LAZNIA 1 PARAKINO: Symptomatic Eruptions of the Avant-garde
7 June 2018, 7 pm
Centre for Contemporary Art LAZNIA 1, Gdansk Lower Town
Free entry
Curator of the screenings: Gosia Wojas
Centre for Contemporary Art LAZNIA 1, Gdansk Lower Town
Free entry
Curator of the screenings: Gosia Wojas
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Artists & movies:
Martine Syms, Notes on Gesture, 2015, 10:30 min.
Kim Schoen, Is it Opera or is it Something Political, 2009, 7 min.
Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley, This is Offal, 2016, 12:51 min.
Stanya Kahn, It’s Cool, I’m Good, 2010, 35:24 min.
Kim Schoen, Is it Opera or is it Something Political, 2009, 7 min.
Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley, This is Offal, 2016, 12:51 min.
Stanya Kahn, It’s Cool, I’m Good, 2010, 35:24 min.
Rupture. Revolution. Symptomatic eruptions of the avant-garde. The symbolic is no longer capable of directing the semiotic energies. Its subversive, dispersing energies transgress the boundaries of the tolerable limits of the symbolic. Elizabeth Grosz’s study of the French theorist, Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalysis theory on abjection, and its relation to subjectivity, presents a metaphor for the contemporary socio-political (human) spectacle playing out before our eyes - in short, the simultaneous production and subversion of representation and meaning in discourse.
Struggles between power constructs and resistances materialize in the video works by artists, Stanya Kahn, Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley, Kim Schoen and Martine Syms. Using various strategies of abject performativity within a moving image the artists examine constructs of meaning within social, political and historical structures in areas where representation and its structural boundaries are under constant threat of breakdown. It is simultaneously in the state of becoming and subverting the production of meaning in a manner of dramatizing and reproducing a new idea that representation becomes a situation, an event, rather than a fact.
Martine Syms’s video, Notes on Gesture, points to specific gestures that might be assumed as emblematic of black women’s body language, yet Syms deconstructs and restructures by revisiting gestures, words and behavior that are associated with black femininity. In Is it Opera or is it Something Political Kim Schoen presents a video portrait of a female actor instructed to speak in non-sense for 7 minutes straight as at once hilarious and captivating work that operates as a transgressive act of rupture and provocation in the symbolic language. A provocative act of absurdity continues to play out in Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley’s video spectacle, This is Offal, in which the artists devised a distinctive rhetoric that inspire socio-political concerns around issues of female (in)visibility in art and historical discourses. In It’s Cool, I’m Good, Stanya Kahn uses wit, humor and tropes of Kristeva’s theory of abjection to claim a stage for resistance to capitalist systems of order by a way of placing disorientation and structural incoherence that disrupts the the static and the familiar of everyday.
Struggles between power constructs and resistances materialize in the video works by artists, Stanya Kahn, Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley, Kim Schoen and Martine Syms. Using various strategies of abject performativity within a moving image the artists examine constructs of meaning within social, political and historical structures in areas where representation and its structural boundaries are under constant threat of breakdown. It is simultaneously in the state of becoming and subverting the production of meaning in a manner of dramatizing and reproducing a new idea that representation becomes a situation, an event, rather than a fact.
Martine Syms’s video, Notes on Gesture, points to specific gestures that might be assumed as emblematic of black women’s body language, yet Syms deconstructs and restructures by revisiting gestures, words and behavior that are associated with black femininity. In Is it Opera or is it Something Political Kim Schoen presents a video portrait of a female actor instructed to speak in non-sense for 7 minutes straight as at once hilarious and captivating work that operates as a transgressive act of rupture and provocation in the symbolic language. A provocative act of absurdity continues to play out in Mary Reid and Patrick Kelley’s video spectacle, This is Offal, in which the artists devised a distinctive rhetoric that inspire socio-political concerns around issues of female (in)visibility in art and historical discourses. In It’s Cool, I’m Good, Stanya Kahn uses wit, humor and tropes of Kristeva’s theory of abjection to claim a stage for resistance to capitalist systems of order by a way of placing disorientation and structural incoherence that disrupts the the static and the familiar of everyday.
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Gosia Wojas is an artist and a curator. She is the founder of Projekt Papier, an archive documenting artistic, social and curatorial practices. Editor of upcoming publication series, The Absent Museum, a publication concept that investigates the relationship between institutions and social practices, and Material-i-ty/ Material-and-you, a collection of essays proposing relations to the notion of materiality in contemporary culture. She has organized film screenings, exhibitions and performances at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2018), Women’s Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles (2016), Souterrain gallery, Hoffmann Collection in Berlin, Germany (2012), Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2008), and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (2007) where she served as a director from 2006–2009.
Still from the Mary Reid's & Patrick Kelley'sThis is Offal
The curator would like to thank the artists Stanya Kahn, Mary Reid Kelley, Kim Schoen, and Martine Syms, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects gallery director, Ariel Lauren Pittman, and Łaźnia’s staff: curator Jolanta Woszczenko and PR specialist Justyna Mazur.
BIP