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Plakatas parodai

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Contemporary Art Daily. A Daily Journal of International Exhibitions. | Artist: Liam Gillick Venue: Le Magasin, Grenoble Exhibition Title: From 199C to 199D Date: June 6 – September 7, 2014 Click here to view

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MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZIN.

documentation of the exhibition

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From 199C to 199D. Liam Gillick

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick

We might think of a trick as something fraudulent. But then, as with a modern conjuror, fraud too requires an exact mimesis of nature. Think of the airplane wing. Think of the blue feather ensuring that the arrow flies straight. So we need to be thinking of the trick as something scientific and real, bearing a scrupulous understanding and manipulation of things, including the human body in relation to such things. But the trick slides, it seduces, it cajoles (“Hey Duchess!”), it knows and enjoys the leap beyond the thingness of things.

Michael Taussig[1]

A plasterboard box, four and a half meters long, two and a half meters wide and of the same in the grand floor of Klaipeda Art Centre, is actually a room in a room. The space isolated from the inner space of the building is as an island. A bit like a boat, I would say. Just like a boat, it is stimulating imagination.

Physically it is the remnant from the French-Lithuanian exhibition “Prestige: Phantasmagoria now”, that was held in the autumn of 2012. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his text, published in catalogue of the exhibition[2], adverts that the term ‘prestige’  came from the vocabulary of illusionists and is one of three component parts of a magic trick; its outcome, to be more precise. A prestige follows a pledge, when at a first glance ordinary objects are presented in a particular situation; and the trick itself that transforms conventional situation into an extraordinary moment.

I do not consider magic literally. I think about things, about stories things tell, how they tell them; about   relations of those objects, stories and storytelling techniques (with subjects), and dynamics between them.

I am thinking about situations that have the ability to create a pretext for rapture or difference to occur in a flow.

The box left from the latter exhibition (being part of the last stage of the trick) here, through the trick itself, turns into its germ – the pledge.  Now it is a trigger for another project, which is extended in time for a season, like TV series.

[1] Michael Taussig, The Stories Things Tell And Why They Tell Them, e-flux journal#36, 07/ 2012, www.e-flux.com

[2] Prestige: Phantasmagoria Now, exhibition catalog, Klaipėda: KCCC, 2012, p. 24.

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 01 – While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain

Author of the exhibition is a young Lithuanian artist Andrius Svilys (born 1992) who now lives and works in London.

01 – While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain

Andrius: A short story from Gert Jonke‘s pseudo-autobiographical novel The System of Vienna got me thinking about sculptures that want.  I wonder about relationships that bond things. How would sculptures express their attraction to each other?

Neringa: A desire. Also, a desire of fruit trees of distant lands.

Andrius: The only witnesses of that garden are the sculptural fragments and materials that are typical to that region, but are not from that region and not from that garden – only evoking those places.

Neringa: Looking at the garden, I notice a breast (this word sounds so strange when it’s singular) that is made from transparent resin, overgrown by false bronze… I remember a prop.

Andrius: According to Wikipedia, props are elements of scenography, which are manipulated by actors, i.e. are touched or hand-held.

Neringa: Installation as a scenography or a game?..

Andrius: But what do you think about art as a detective fiction?

  Author of the exhibition: Andrius Svilys

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: KCCC, The Purple Swamphen

Dates of the exhibition: 19 April - 26 May, 2013

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 01 – While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain, Andrius Svilys, 2013

Curator Neringa Bumblienė

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 02 – As If the Arrow Is Thinking

Authors of the exhibition “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 02 – As If the Arrow Is Thinking” are young artists’ duet Tim Kliukoit (b. 1984, lives and studies in Vilnius) and Paul Paper (b. 1985, lives and studies in London). They are interested in a possible dynamics of relation between an artwork, an artist and a viewer. 

02 – As If the Arrow Is Thinking

It is as if the arrow is neither in the room, nor on the stage. I keep remembering a slide that Tim has found somewhere and even though there is no arrow in the slide either – I am thinking about circus and performances of conjurers (in duet!), where the arrow could be found at.

That is how the arrow is touching you with one of its verges. Therefore, once you enter a room, the room is also a stage. And once you are in the stage, it becomes less clear if you are here as a random follower, or as a performer, a conjurer, an artist; or as a tamer of it, of the arrow, who pulls in the string of the bow. Not necessarily the bow, perhaps. Perhaps the arrow could slice the air without the bow. Could it fly without you?

And since you are the tamer, the artist, the conjurer, the performer or just an arrow-following, room-entering stranger, insensibly you start thinking about the plurality of the roles. And if you drew a certain parallel here, it may become clear that there is also a target or a point in the plural (i.e. there are targets and points) that are being aimed at.

But.

Maybe the arrow is self-dependent and even when you think you are aiming with it at a target (or, as has been clarified previously, at targets), the arrow might turn back and aim itself at you. At this moment all the essence of a game is poured out from its box and all figurines on a board are rearranged in a completely new order.

Thus you start thinking that the arrow necessarily exists. It is aiming at a target, at targets, at a network of targets, at a line, at a spiral, stretching itself into an infinite, and at you. As I was once told: if there is a weapon (the arrow!) on a stage, it will inevitably shoot at the end.

  Authors of the exhibition: Tim Kliukoit and Paul Paper

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Dates of the exhibition 31 May - 14 July, 2013

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 02 – As If the Arrow Is Thinking, Tim Kliukoit and Paul Paper, 2013

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė 

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 03 – Against Their Reason

Author of the exhibition “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 03 – Against Their Reason” is a young French artist Simon Nicaise (born 1982). S. Nicaise works with sculptural objects. He lives and creates in Paris. The artist’s works often reveal unexpected and unpredictable, yet somehow possible sides of things and gestures.

03 – Against Their Reason 

Somehow recently, I have become able to step into moments of misunderstanding. It is not only about language (nails nailed into themselves). It is also about gestures and objects (penetrating whiteness of the wall in front of your half-closed eyes).

I was really baffled at first, but then I realized I can now concentrate on lining instead of linen. This is how the football field has been marked anew. A smell of paint. A whistle of a coach; frightening and hypnotizing simultaneously.

Coronation of misunderstanding (the game is dead, long live the game!) is an opportunity to understand, misunderstand and understand everything anew. There is a space of seven breaths in this playground, where you can add some things or take them away, where you can redirect causality. Here, a windmill does not turn because of winds anymore. Now it is celestial bodies, conceptualized movement of celestial bodies that determine the spin.

Time.

After all, these moments of misunderstanding rarely occur in solitude. Even though it is not always obvious, it is still about different kinds of interactions in the end.

Somehow recently...

  Author of the exhibition: Simon Nicaise

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Dates of the exhibition: 19 July - 18 August, 2013

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 03 – Against Their Reason, SImon Nicaise, 2013

Curator Neringa Bumblienė

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 04 – Kiva

Author of the exhibition “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 04 – Kiva” is a French artist Aymeric Ebrard (born 1977), who is based in Paris, but has lately spent some time traveling in Arizona (USA) and Lithuania. He looks at foreign lands trying to hear a resonance of stories, fables and myths from different layers of time. Collecting things as signs of communities as well as landmarks, the artist tries to grope a point of origin, a starting point which lastly appears being inevitably dynamic and can only generate new though never ending systems of coordinates.

04 – Kiva[1]

Tovar [the leader of the Spanish] and his men were conducted to Oraibi. They were met by all the clan chiefs at Tawtoma, as prescribed by prophecy, where four lines of sacred meal were drawn. The Bear Clan leader stepped up to the barrier and extended his hand, palm up, to the leader of the white men. If he was indeed the true Pahana, the Hopis knew he would extend his own hand, palm down, and clasp the Bear Clan leader's hand to form the nakwach, the ancient symbol of brotherhood. Tovar instead curtly commanded one of his men to drop a gift into the Bear chief's hand, believing that the Indian wanted a present of some kind. Instantly all the Hopi chiefs knew that Pahana had forgotten the ancient agreement made between their peoples at the time of their separation. Nevertheless, the Spaniards were escorted up to Oraibi, fed and quartered, and the agreement explained to them. It was understood that when the two were finally reconciled, each would correct the other's laws and faults; they would live side by side and share in common all the riches of the land and join their faiths in one religion that would establish the truth of life in a spirit of universal brotherhood.

The Spaniards did not understand, and having found no gold, they soon departed.

Frank Waters[2]

  Author of the exhibition: Aymeric Ebrard

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Dates of the exhibition: 30 August - 20 October, 2013

[1] A kiva is a room used by modern Puebloans (Native American people in the Southwestern United States) for religious rituals, as well for other social profane activities. They are specific to each clans and community, and each of them represent the world itself and show the point of emergence.

[2] Frank Waters, „Book of The Hopi“, 1963, p. 252.

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 04 – Kiva, Aymeric Ebrard, 2013

Curator Neringa Bumblienė

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 05 – Things, Where Things don’t Belong

The author of the exhibition “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 05 – Things, Where Things Don’t Belong” is the artist Mindaugas Bumblys (born 1983) based in Lithuania. While peering through a thick cultural stratum and referring to art history as well as to local identity, M. Bumblys rethinks possible points of intersection and interchange between a thing as a handy object and an artwork as unhandy thing in the white cube situation.

05 – Things, Where Things Don’t Belong

The whole room

Is things, even

Where things

Don’t belong.

What is that old

Man’s public face

Doing sorrowing,

Secretly a little,

A little above and

A little back from

A limp arm?

What is that thing

Doing sorrowing

Where things

Don’t belong?[1]

  Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Dates of the exhibition: 31 October - 24 November, 2013

[1] Re-edited poem “The Last Pietà, In Florence” by James Wright

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 05 – Things, Where Things don’t Belong, Mindaugas Bumblys, 2013

Curator Neringa Bumblienė

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A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 06 – Last Time

The authors of the exhibition/episode “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 06 – Last Time” are a duo of New York-based Lithuanian artists: Ugnius Gelguda (b. 1977) and Neringa Černiauskaitė (b. 1984). The duo works with different media and present their new projects that touch upon the notion of time, or communicate a specific outlook towards the past, the present and the future questioning their chronological order; the archeology of the future that is constructing in the present; inquire the relations between a copy and the original. It is also here that the dynamics between an artwork and its author, an author and a viewer, a viewer and an artwork (a re-artwork, a copy) are reexamined.

  We might think of a trick, or of anything else, as something fraudulent. But then, as it happens with a modern conjuror, convincing frauds require an exact cognition of things.

Our new works in varied resolutions question the meaning and the notion of the copy by weaving speculative ties to the past and to the future. In fact, some of them have been provoked or given rise by the circumstances that have presently emerged, i.e. the so-called super-storm Sandy that has caused the most damage and, subsequently, the overt preparations of New York City for its slow submersion; it’s becoming an object of future archeology. In Klaipėda we will present two out of four of our latest projects – a 16mm film as well as porcelain twigs.

The short 16mm film “Last Time We Walked on The Frozen River” is a documentation of a reenactment of Hans Haacke’s intervention into an ecosystem in 1965. On the Coney Island shore, Brooklyn, the artist formed temporal live sculptures by feeding seagulls off a pier. Only the swarms of seagulls are captured in the photographs; the hands of the artist that fed the seagulls, however, are left outside the frame. In 2013, when speculations on the future of the city are turning out to be the official part of the politics concerning the city of the present, the reenactment of this intervention becomes especially urgent. The medium of film, not of photography, underscores the readjustment of focus from the creation of the temporal sculptures to the performative intervening act.

Guided by the aforementioned circumstance of the present, we collected various examples of twigs and branches from Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to cast them in white porcelain for the future. During the process of one material – wood – turning into another one – porcelain, the primary source is obliterated. It is the “copy”, but the attempt to preserve that comes first. Any attempt of this kind irreversibly transforms or even destroys that which it chooses as its object of preservation.

Artists: Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Dates of the exhibition: 29 November - 31 December, 2013