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13/11/2014

Melanie Gilligan / The Otolith Group

Casco's new space, Utrecht

Melanie Gilligan
The Common Sense, Phase 1

New York-based artist Melanie Gilligan’s largest project to date, The Common Sense takes the form of a sci-fi mini-series which looks at how minds, bodies, and interpersonal relations are shaped by technological advancements within capitalism. This experimental narrative drama tells a story that revolves around a future technology which allows one to directly experience another person's bodily sensations and affect. After a decade of transforming the conditions of work and social life, for the most part in accordance with economic demands, the technology’s networks suddenly fail causing massive disorientation. People withdraw and isolate themselves from the public, no longer knowing how to communicate. Once the system comes back online, the story splits into two scenarios: one version shows a period of normalization after the rupture, while in the other people confront the ways that the technology has been exploitatively used for years, some forming social movements to resist the continuation of these conditions.

Gilligan draws upon a feminist sci-fi tradition that includes the work of writers Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin in which sci-fi is used as a means for both critiquing a social order and proposing a different vision. The story is also influenced by recent social movements and riots across the world responding to the “permanent crisis” of capitalism. Ultimately the goal of the series is to discuss how our interactions become entangled with and reproduce capitalist conditions. Gilligan explores the complex relationship between the technological development as propelled by capitalist accumulation and how interpersonal relations and emotions are instrumentalized in this process. However, the artist also leaves open some uncertainty for possibilities regarding the new conditions technological change can create.

This series is the first co-commission by three institutions in the Netherlands of a single work by an artist. This winter it is presented sequentially in overlapping exhibitions with different episodes opening at Casco in Utrecht, De Hallen Haarlem, and de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, creating a nomadic viewing experience through which to see the entire work. The Common Sense was filmed in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Toronto and is supported by Dommering Foundation and Galerie Max Mayer. The Toronto shooting was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Charles Street Video, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery University of Toronto, and LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto). The exhibition is presented in the context of Casco’s 2013–2015 program guideline "Composing the Commons".

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The Otolith Group
In the Year of the Quiet Sun

The Otolith Group’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands configures moments from the grand project of mid-twentieth century Pan-Africanism. Envisaged as the total liberation of the African continent from Europe’s empires, the project focuses on a micro artifact, namely the postal stamp, issued to commemorate the independence of African nation-states. In the Year of the Quiet Sun incorporates three major new works consisting of a film, an Incomplete Timeline of Independence Stamps with over 4,000 stamps from Africa, and an installation devoted to the first decade in the publishing of controversial journal Transition.

The post-lens based essay-film In the Year of the Quiet Sun, also the title of the exhibition, explores the role of the Ghana Philatelic Agency. This mysterious Wall Street company created the Pan-Africanist Pop aesthetic associated with the independent state of Ghana from 1957 until the overthrow of its first President, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966. Connecting postal politics depicting antagonistic policies of newly independent states to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement within the unstable context of the global Cold War, the title also points to the decrease in solar surface temperature that occurs every eleven years.

Occupying two rooms of Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory’s new space, the installation Statecraft envisions the short century of decolonization as a political calendar assembled from the medium of the postage stamp. These masscult artifacts were issued to commemorate the independence of Africa’s new nation-states, from Liberia in 1847 to South Sudan in 2011. Here they are integrated into an elaborate display system that functions indexically as an Incomplete Timeline of Independence Stamps, determined by Digital Auction. This formation reveals the iconography of independence as a combination of Pan-Africanist Pop Art, New Elizabethan cult of personality, and Social Realist portraiture.

The installation One Out of Many Afrophilias displays the first decade of the controversial periodical Transition founded in 1961 in Kampala, Uganda by poet and editor Rajat Neogy. From its inception, Transition acted as a platform for avant-garde African literature. It was also a crucible for an intense debate over the direction of African political cultures that only intensified in 1967, when its funders, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were revealed to be supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. Issues 1 to 50 of Transition will be on display and copies will be available to browse.

At the opening, the animation Sovereign Sisters will be screened. Conceived and directed by The Otolith Group and animated by Scanlab, Sovereign Sisters depicts the Monument to the Universal Postal Union, designed by René de Saint-Marceaux in 1909. The globe encircled by goddesses that represent the five continents personifies the imperial infrastructure of the Universal Postal Union that continues into the present within the framework of the United Nations. In Sovereign Sisters, the automatism of planetary infrastructure is depicted as a wraith-like entity that turns on its axis for eternity.

The works in the exhibition were co-commissioned and co-developed in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Casco in partnership with Artsonje Center, Seoul. In the Year of the Quiet Sun was co-commissioned by Casco and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and in partnership with Artsonje Center, Seoul. The initial conception of In the Year of Quiet Sun is made possible with special support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Image: Melanie Gilligan The Common Sense campaign, 2014

Opening : 14 Nov 2014 h.18:00

Casco Projects
Lange Nieuwstraat 7,
3512 PA Utrecht,
The Netherlands
Hours: Mon–Fri, 12:00–18:00 hr

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