Two exhibitions
dal 10/10/2007 al 10/11/2007
Segnalato da
10/10/2007
Two exhibitions
Extra City Center for Contemporary Art, Antwerp
Luke Fowler presents The Nine Monads Of David Bell. Living in Glasgow, he has become known for his elaborate and poetic portrayals of past radical social experiments. Joachim Koester's solo exhibition Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome brings together four recent and new works. He uses strategies of montage, archiving and storytelling to illuminate historical events.
Luke Fowler:
The Nine Monads Of David Bell
Luke Fowler presents "The Nine Monads Of David Bell" (2007). Living and working in Glasgow, Luke has become known for his elaborate and poetic portrayals of past radical social experiments. Such as composer Cornelius Cardew's famous Scratch Orchestra featured in his film “Pilgrimage From Scattered Points” (2006). Luke's installation departs from his film "What you see is where you’re at" (2001), a portrait of the Kingsley Hall community (Philadelphia Association 1965-1969). This beacon of the anti-psychiatry movement provided a counter model to the mental institution, breaking down notions of treatment and the doctor/patient hierarchy.
Focusing on one of Kingsley Hall’s residents, "The Nine Monads Of David Bell" furthers an investigation into his world. David Bell was a mathematician who moved to London in the 1950 s to work as a computer programmer. After an unexplained accident at a nuclear firm Bell became a patient of Dr. Leon Redler, a young American Psychiatrist working at Kingsley Hall. Despite their clinical characterization as pure “schizophrenese”, David Bell's words were valued and recorded at Kingsley Hall. Recordings now woven through the sound work presented alongside the Fowler's original film, "What you see is where you’re at" (2001) to make up "The Nine Monads Of David Bell".
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Joachim Koester:
Numerous Incidents Of Indefinite Outcome
Joachim Koester's solo exhibition "Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome" brings together four recent and new works. Joachim Koester uses strategies of montage, archiving and storytelling to illuminate historical events. In the past few years he traces the invisible and forgotten histories of transgression, exploring the legacies and remains such as of occult movements and psychedelic experiments. The exhibition departs from the better known film "Morning of the Magicians" (2005), in which Joachim visits a house in Cefalù, Sicily, that once served as a communal home for the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and his group of devotees, called the "The Abbey of Thelema". "One + One + One" (2006) takes the artist's engagement with the "The Abbey of Thelema" further. By placing a girl playing the drumbeats of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the house's garden, he weaves together the histories of counter-culture, the aesthetics of transgression, subjective transformation and political revolt.
The title of the work is also a reference to Jean-Luc Godard's '68 film "One+One", which was titled "Sympathy for the Devil" in the United States. In a third work, Joachim Koester uses the drawings Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux made under the influence of Mescaline. "My Frontier is an Endless wall of Points" is a 16mm film in which these drawings are being animated, as if coming "back to life" again, thus addressing the question of translatability of something physical and material (that of the psychoactive substance, but as well the materiality of the drawing) into mental images, ideas, and states of mind. Finally, "Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome" is also the title of a newly produced multi-channel monitor work, which draws on H.P. Lovecraft. A cult figure in the canon of the horror genre, Lovecraft published his unrealized stories and ideas in a book called "The Notes and Commonplace Book". By processing the notes of the book through a computer program, a series of new outlines are generated and displayed on the monitors. Joachim Koester turns Lovecraft's ideas into a mental theatre, confronting the tradition of horror narratives introduced by Edgar Allan Poe with the experimental text tradition and the cut-up method of William Bouroughs and Brian Gysin.
The exhibition of Luke Fowler is made possible through the generous support from The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Joachim Koester's exhibition is supported by Jan Mot Gallery, Brussels.
Image: Luke Fowler
Opening October 11th, 7 pm
Extra City
Klamperstraat 40 - 2060 Antwerp