calendario eventi  :: 

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5/9/2014

Two exhibitions

Cornerhouse, Manchester

Qasim Riza Shaheen: Autoportraits in love-like conditions

Manchester-based artist and writer Qasim Riza Shaheen presents a major new exhibition, Autoportraits in love-like conditions. This is a show staged in two parts in partnership with mac birmingham, where a second, related body of work will be exhibited under the title The last known pose.

Autoportraits in love-like conditions includes performance, film, photography, audio recordings, drawings and mixed media, and features new commissions produced by Shaheen over a 12-month period spent in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. It will focus on silent tales of love and the connections between people, while exploring simulated moments of intimacy with strangers through imagery and role-play.

New installation Between Refrains is based upon an intergenerational dialogue between the artist and his father. It follows Shaheen’s invitation to his father to dance with him to a 1950s recording of ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ by Ron Goodwin and his Concert Orchestra. An ensemble of imagery, voice and music will play out over his father’s drawings, paintings and handwritings, revealing their candid conversations and the narrative of their relationship.

Performance work One will premiere at the exhibition preview on Friday 5 September. The piece, which was researched and developed with local residents and artists at the National Visual Arts Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, will feature repetitive thoughts, statements and actions delivered over a beat that marks the beginning and end of a time cycle. Points of arrival and departure are central to this improvisational work, and the performers will deliver the piece in a trance-like state.

Misplaced Memoirs is an intimate, site-specific scenography of desire and unrequited love, performed to three audience members at a time in the Palace Hotel in Manchester. Based on written self-portraits and delivered in an autobiographical and confessional manner, the piece will explore notions of queerness and unrequited love through stories of desire, past relationships and an expressed urgency for the ritual of marriage. Misplaced Memoirs will be newly adapted for this exhibition; a previous version was performed at the Queer Contact Festival 2012 and the SPILL Festival of Performance 2013.

In Backward Glances, Shaheen will showcase his belongings to reveal the processes behind these new works. Images of performers in simulated love-like conditions will replace the artist’s personal photographs, interrupting and reinventing these archived histories. These fictional events interrogate the nature of portraiture, authenticity and longing.

Autoportraits in love-like conditions researches the fragile architecture of the space between people, metaphysical communication and desire, attraction and reaction, the real and the imagined. By reproducing connections and moments from his own life, Shaheen reveals the universal nature of human experience. In his work we see reflections of ourselves and others whom we hold close, and the intimate experiences that define our lives.

The second half of this exhibition, The last known pose, takes place at mac birmingham from Saturday 20 September – Sunday 30 November, with a preview on Fri 19 September.

This exhibition will also be supported by a publication, produced and distributed by Cornerhouse Publications.

The exhibition preview drinks are sponsored by Absolut.

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Sophia Al-Maria: Virgin with a Memory
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Artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria, who rose to fame with her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth, presents a newly commissioned body of work for her first major exhibition, Virgin with a Memory.

The exhibition takes its cue from Beretta, Al-Maria’s unfinished debut feature film. The film has stalled in pre-production for three years having faced immense schedule, budget and legal complications. Virgin with a Memory alludes to the production challenges faced by Al-Maria and the social and political themes that are central to the film’s plot.

Both an homage to cult cinema and a call to arms, Beretta is a rape-revenge thriller following mute heroine Suad who embarks on a killing spree, murdering men who harass her and other women. Set in contemporary Egypt, it tells both the story of a woman who is pushed to extremes by her environment, and a country that was raped and degraded by its governments.

The exhibition features new five-channel video installation The Watchers No. 1-5 (2014), which evokes the all-seeing male gaze with a reenactment of a dream sequence from Beretta’s script. Conceived as a ‘deleted scenes’ extra from the unmade movie, it will form the centrepiece of Virgin with a Memory, presenting a nightmarish cavalcade of aggressive male scrutiny, using sweeping searchlights and an ominous droning soundtrack. The men depicted in the piece represent Beretta’s five villains. In a departure from the plot, they are shown holding an eternal vigil, acting as gatekeepers to the final realisation of the film.

Four new pseudo-documentary works relate directly to the production of Beretta. Class A (2014) is a video-ode to a Beretta actress who was jailed before filming began. Slaughter (2013) is culled from the first film footage shot during the 2012 Eid al Adha (Festival of Sacrifice). Your Sister (2014) is an imitation music video made to play on a television on Beretta’s set. Video piece Evil Eye (2014) is a direct response to the testing delays faced by the production team during the seemingly cursed development stage of the film.

The novelised version of Beretta’s script, Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-in, will be published for the exhibition. This piece is predicated on Al-Maria’s idea that in today’s challenging environment for independent cinema, the only way to achieve an unadulterated director’s cut of a film is to write it as a novel, making it the director’s sole property. Darker and more introspective than the medium of film allows, the novel is written from the perspective of Suad and interspersed with entries from Al-Maria’s production diary. It also features production research, emails, budgets, kit-lists, schedules, sketches, storyboards, headshots and excerpts from the shooting script. It will be on display in the exhibition and available to buy from the bookshop.

The exhibition preview drinks are sponsored by Absolut.

Press Enquiries:
Elisa Ruff, Media & Communications Officer on T: + 44 (0)161 2001529 or M: +44 (0)7852 191752, E: elisa.ruff@cornerhouse.org - press@cornerhouse.org

Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street Manchester M1 5NH
Mon - Closed, Tue - Sat 12:00 - 20:00, Sun 12:00 - 18:00
Admission Free

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