Khan: In this new body of work, Khan re-photographs and digitally layers a sequence or series of pictures in an enigmatic play of appropriation and re-creation. Stephen Willats: he exhibition comprises three major new collaborative works conceived in the last two years, alongside other new film and text works and recent drawings.
Idris Khan
Victoria Miro Gallery is delighted to present the first UK solo exhibition by London artist Idris Khan. This exhibition runs in conjunction
with the presentation of Khan’s first film installation, A Memory After Bach’s Cello Suites, a project jointly commissioned by Victoria
Miro Gallery and inIVA, where it will be screened from 13 September until 22 October 2006.
In this new body of work, Khan re-photographs and digitally layers a sequence or series of pictures in an enigmatic play of
appropriation and re-creation. His photographs possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting and are presented as a kind
of photographic palimpsest, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand. The influence of early proponents of the
modern typology movement, Karl Blossfeldt and later, Bernd and Hilla Becher, has strong resonance in the work of Idris Khan. At one
remove from typology, Khan collapses and condenses series of images to create work that proposes new visual and conceptual terms to
consider and distill historical photographic practice. According to the artist, his work offers ‘a playful emblem of our own departure
from the corpse of photography, burdened with what the Futurist Anton Guilio Bragaglia once referred to as its “glacial reproduction of
reality".’
Fascinated by the images, practitioners and theoretical writings that have influenced the history of photography, the artist has
recently moved beyond the subject of photography to literature and music. Struggling to Hear…After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas,
2005 condenses sheets of music from Beethoven’s piano sonatas to a single composite image. The work poignantly considers
Beethoven’s personal frustration with the deterioration of his hearing. Musical notes coalesce in a dense blur of abstract movement
and chart their own rhythm across the page in an attempt to be heard. Offering a visual replication of the composer’s frustration,
Khan suggests that the memory of music - its idea, shape and image - became more essential to Beethoven than its sound.
An enlarged page of multi-layered text from one of Freud’s key psychoanalytic works forms the photograph Sigmund Freud’s ‘The
Uncanny’, 2006. The image challenges the viewer to digest all the essay’s words in one glance. As the artist describes: ‘it’s kind of a
fantasy and a nightmare rolled into one - the wish fulfillment of apprehending a whole book in an instant, but the fear and anxiety of
never being able to understand what the book wants to tell us’. Beneath the shadows of the text two images emerge - Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne. In his book Sigmund Freud discusses these paintings with reference to the
‘Vulture fantasy’ - claimed to be da Vinci’s first visual memory as a child. In this fantasy da Vinci describes a vulture sweeping down
onto his chest and pecking into his mouth. Freud interprets this reference as a manifestation of the erotic relations between mother and
child: “My mother pressed countless passionate kisses on my lips". The mouth, often rendered as an enigmatic smile, is a potent
feature of da Vinci’s female figures and has, for viewers, long produced the most powerful and confusing effect. In Khan’s ‘The
Idris Khan
Uncanny’ a deep dark void draws the viewer into the image, echoing what historical writers and poets have written about this smile:
‘she who seems to smile seductively, now to stare coldly and soullessly into the void.’
Returning to photography’s historical archives, Khan’s body of work entitled, Rising Series..... After Eadweard Muybridge 'Human and
Animal Locomotion', 2005 looks back to early scientific experimentations with photography. This series of five platinum prints borrow
images from Muybridge’s sequential motion studies of human and animal form. Khan’s intimate works, both in scale and subject,
realise an aesthetic and narrative quality far removed from the scientific pedigree of Muybridge’s research.
Creating an unequivocally
pictorial aesthetic, the choreographed movements of these human subjects, now seemingly suspended between the present and the
afterlife, evoke the Victorian fascination with the spiritual and metaphysical possibilities of photography.
Khan affords similar treatment to the photographs of plant segments collected by pioneering 19th century photographer Karl
Blossfeldt. Some 6,000 plants were captured on film as a pedagogical record in Blossfeldt’s book, ‘Art Forms in Nature’, as he sought to
expound the principle that ‘nature is our best teacher’. Khan’s ghostly Blossfeldt..... After Karl Blossfeldt 'Art Forms in Nature', 2005
belies its natural origins and solicits a psychological mood and relationship with the work, formerly extracted by Blossfeldt’s meticulous
documentation of characteristic, detail, pattern and texture of nature.
A Memory After Bach’s Cello Suites, 2006
This September, Idris Khan will premiere, A Memory After Bach’s Cello Suites, a film installation jointly commissioned by inIVA and Victoria Miro
Gallery. The film is a natural progression of Khan’s photographic practice, using digitally layered imagery and the sounds of cellist Gabriella Swallow
playing Bach’s Six Suites for the Cello Solo to produce a film that evokes a new kind of vision through transformative repetition of sight and sound.
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Stephen Willats
From My Mind To Your Mind
Victoria Miro Gallery is delighted to present From My Mind to Your Mind by British artist Stephen Willats. The exhibition
comprises three major new collaborative works conceived in the last two years, alongside other new film and text
works and recent drawings.
Over forty years, Willats’ pioneering work - from his early large-scale works made directly with, and sited within,
communities in diverse locations such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, Liverpool and London up to the works in this exhibition
- has explored and defined interactions between the viewer and the artist. From My Mind to Your Mind extends this
practice through the active participation of collaborators and employment of a variety of media to create clues,
associations and prompts for the viewer. Willats’ new work creates a multi-sensory, multi-channel framework to
encourage viewers to engage in their own creative process. The sensations of walking down a street, the sounds, the
signs, the details and the surfaces are all recorded to re-create an experience and moment of passing.
This exhibition
develops the artist’s observation: ‘that the fabric of daily reality is filled with signs and symbols that radiate their
messages to people without them being able to directly intervene in their origination, but that people, in response to
these messages, construct the consciousness they have of themselves and the world in which they live, the world
they want to see’.
Stephen Willats has long located his work in urban territories meaningful to his practice. London’s Barbican Centre,
developed in the late 1960’s as a template for modern contemporary living, provides the environment for the major
new work in this exhibition entitled, New Visions.
Combining a pictorial language of diagrams, graphic techniques,
photography and audio-visual footage, New Visions offers an interpretation of the future of modern reality through
three key philosophical viewpoints - Satre, Wittgenstein and McLuhen. Through this work the viewer can explore the
different ways the philosophers might have viewed certain environments and encounters. In the making of New
Visions, the outcome was purposefully left open to personal interpretation; there was no right or wrong conclusion.
Ultimately, it is the viewer who has to actively become involved, to answer the questions and to create their own
vision.
Image: Stephen Willats
Private View Saturday 2 September, 6 - 8pm
Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road N1 7RW - London
open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm, admission free