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22/11/2011

Two exhibitions

Lisson Gallery, London

Allora & Calzadilla
Vieques Videos 2003-2011

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show at the gallery ‘Vieques Videos 2003-2011’. Made over the course of a decade Returning a Sound (2004), Under Discussion (2005) and Half Mast/Full Mast (2010) are now shown here together for the first time. Each video addresses the complicated history of Vieques, an inhabited island off Puerto Rico that was used by the United States Navy as a bomb-testing range from 1941 until 2003. The Navy was forced to evacuate by a civil disobedience campaign waged by local residents, with supporters throughout the world. Allora & Calzadilla contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled ‘Landmark’, informed by the following questions: ‘How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?’

In Vieques the future of the reclaimed land remains uncertain and largely insulated from democratic claims. Returning a Sound (2004) was made at the beginning of the process of demilitarisation, decontamination, and future development and at once celebrates a victory and registers its precariousness. The video addresses not only the landscape of Vieques, but also its soundscape, invoking the memory of the sonic violence of the bombing. It follows Homar, an activist, as he traverses the island on a moped with a trumpet welded to the muffler. The noise-reducing device is diverted from its original purpose: with every jolt of the road and spurt of the engine, the trumpet might summon up the siren of an ambulance, Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Intonarumori or experimental jazz. In his circuit Homar acoustically recapitulates areas of the island formerly exposed to ear-splitting detonations.

Scarred with bomb-craters and with its ecosystem contaminated, the former military land has been designated as a federal wildlife refuge. This designation entails further violence by marginalising the demands of island residents for decontamination and municipal management – the point of departure for Under Discussion (2005). An overturned conference table has been retrofitted with an engine and rudder grafted from a small fishing boat. A local activist uses the motorized table to lead viewers around the restricted area of the island, re-marking the antagonisms that haunt the picturesque coast and bearing witness to the memory of the Fisherman’s Movement, which initiated the first acts of civil disobedience against the ecological fall-out of the bombing. The hybrid device explores the absurd political inequalities of the situation: the table, a common trope for the non-violent resolution of conflict, is forcibly reliant on local navigation.

Half Mast\Full Mast (2010) draws attention to the unfinished political, economic, and ecological reconstruction of the island as inhabitants grapple with the legacy of military occupation. Departing from the noisy dynamism of the earlier videos, Half Mast\Full Mast adopts a slower, more meditative approach. Projected at life-size, the silent video is comprised of 19 partitions; each is split into two landscape views of various sites in Vieques, stacked on top of one another. The horizontal divide is then crossed by two poles, aligned as if a continuous object. In each partition a young man hoists himself up the pole from standing to a horizontal position, and with intense exertion momentarily becomes an unofficial flag – before endurance gives way to gravity. The gesture functions to reframe specific sites around Vieques significant to the military occupation and subsequent struggles in terms of a deceptively simple semiotic convention: the flying of the flag at half-mast (a sign of mourning) or full-mast (‘normal’ conditions). In ‘becoming’ a flag, however unofficial, absurd or precarious, the performers short-circuit the flag’s symbolic relation between parts and wholes. In Half Mast\Full Mast, the individual body ‘literally’ stands in for the flag, obliterating it as an official place for the collective body of the nation.

Alternating in an unpredictable manner between upper and lower segments of the composition, the appearance sometimes celebrates or salutes a particular site (such as places related to the history of civil disobedience), while in others it indicates a sense of discontent, if not crisis (such as the luxury W hotel recently constructed in Vieques). In other instances, the gesture is ambivalent relative to the sites in question, suspended somewhere between disaster and progress, oblivion and memory, grief and hope – oscillations that rebound on a broader scale between all three Vieques videos.

Jennifer Allora was born in Philadelphia in 1974 and Guillermo Calzadilla in Havana, Cuba, in 1971; they live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They have previously had two solo exhibitions at Lisson Gallery in 2007 and 2004. Major solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2009); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Haus der Kunst München, Munich (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle Zurich (2007); The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago (2007); Dallas Museum of Art (2006) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006). Allora & Calzadilla represented the United States at the 54rd Venice Biennale.

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Daniel Buren
One things to another, situated works

Lisson Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new site specific and situated works by Daniel Buren, France’s most influential living artist. His first solo show in the UK since 2009 will include a large scale installation and outdoor work. For over forty years Buren has examined the role of the gallery as a supposedly neutral space. He creates works “in situ”, by working within the context of existing architectural, spatial and social elements.

Since the 1960s Buren’s critical analysis of painting -attempting to refine the act to an elemental form - led him to find what is now a trademark “visual tool”, the use of 8.7cm wide white and coloured vertical stripes. Once chosen for its anonymity and neutral presence, the stripe has become a signature for Buren’s work. Buren explains: “The visual tool is no longer a work to be seen, or to be beheld, but is the element that permits you to see or behold something else”.

For his exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Daniel Buren developed A Perimeter for a Room (2011), a new work in situ for the gallery main space. The work traces a line following the full perimeter of the space. The horizontal transparent Plexiglas panels coloured with self-adhesive vinyl, lined up sequentially at a set height along the walls, alter our perception of space by introducing a new height within the room and by washing the walls with coloured shadows. While the work uses a familiar vocabulary in Buren’s oeuvre: colour, light and black and white 8.7 cm stripes, A Perimeter for a Room defines an entirely new system in its treatment of interior space that opens the way for new developments.

The gallery front rooms present a series of works based on an entirely new material made of woven fibre optics. Daniel Buren started to develop works using this technology in 2006, in collaboration with fabric specialists Brochier in Lyon, and presented it in exhibitions in Lille, Lyon and most recently as part of his solo exhibition in Kunsthalle Baden Baden earlier this year. The panels in combinations of rectangular and square shapes create a powerful visual effect, with alternating white and coloured stripes illuminating the space that surrounds them. When unlit, they present a simple surface of white, equivalent to a piece of suspended cloth in linen or cotton. The relationship of the works to the space is architectural, with the panels placed either at the middle of the wall or defining its vertical or horizontal limits.

The exhibition extends outdoor with 4 colours at 3 metres high (2011), a variation on the theme of pergola and ‘attrape soleil’, which Buren has explored in several public works, which play with outdoor light, the movement of the sun and coloured shadows such as La Tonnelle, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007, or the covered walkway Passages under a colored sky (2007) in Anyang, South Korea.

Today Buren is considered one of the most significant figures in conceptual art, pushing the once self-imposed limit and developing it into a complex and varied language. He employins the stripe across canvas, plexiglas, aluminium, wallpaper, and architectural elements, experimenting with light, colour and reflection. Although now one of the most in demand artists by commissioning bodies across the world, in 1969 he was once arrested for covering billboards in Berne with his stripes. The occasion was Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition ‘When Attitude Becomes Form’, in which the artist decided to take part without being invited. In 1971, Buren created an epic installation at the Guggenheim, New York by dressing the central rotunda with a 20 metre high striped cloth. The work was so commanding that it was removed, to great outrage, after fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin claimed it compromised their works in the same group exhibition. Buren was invited back in 2005, creating a reflective tower that reached the roof of the rotunda, accentuating the powerful architectural features of Frank Lloyd-Wright’s iconic building while placing no works along the ascending ramp with the exception of the projection of coloured sunlight.

Buren’s major public interventions can now be seen worldwide at locations including The Palais-Royal in Paris; Odaïba Bay, Tokyo and the Ministry of Labour, Berlin. Few artists are invited as regularly to take part in major international exhibitions as Daniel Buren. He was invited three times to Documenta in Kassel and more than ten times to the Venice Biennale, being awarded the Golden Lion in 1986. Recent exhibitions include a work in situ commissioned for the opening of Turner Contemporary, Margate and his large scale retrospective of works in situ, a joint initiative between Mudam, Luxembourg and Centre Pompidou Metz, France. Buren has been commissioned to create a new permanent installation for the Oxford Street entrance and ticket hall at the upgraded Tottenham Court Road tube station, to be completed in 2016. 200,000 passengers will pass the work each day.

Daniel Buren was born in 1938, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris). He lives and works in situ.
Recent Public Exhibitions:
Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc, Thouars, France (2011); Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2011); Mudam, Luxembourg (2011); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany (2011); Synagogue Stommeln, Pulheim, Germany (2010); and Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany (2010).

Image: Allora & Calzadilla, Under Discussion (2005) single channel colour video, projection with sound 6:14min

For press information and images please contact:
Sophie da Gama Campos or Toby Kidd at JB Pelham PR
Tel: +44 (0)20 8969 3959 Email: sophie@jbpelhampr.com or toby@jbpelhampr.com

Lisson Gallery
29, 52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
Opening Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm

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