Anarcheologiesuk presskit

A N A R C H E O L O G I E S Hypotheses of a Lost Fragment January 9 - 31, 2015

PRESS KIT

Artists : Dirk Bruinsma, Yoeri Guépin, Gabriel Jones, Sarah Jones, Alexandra Navratil, Suska Mackert, Padraig Robinson Commissaire : Alena Alexandrova

e n s a p c Y G R E C 20, RUE LOUISE WEISS 75013 PARIS T +33 (0)1 43 38 49 65 YGREC@ENSAPC.FR WWW.Ensapc.fr/ygrec

É c o l e N a t i o n a l e S u p é r i e u r e d ’ A r t s d e C e r g y

entrée DE 13H À 19H DU MERCREDI AU SAMEDI

P a r i s

République Française − Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication

Curated by: Alena Alexandrova Objects often have a fragmentary nature. In many cases they are torn from their past and their context and are transformed into figures that assign them with identities and promise of knowledge. Archives, collections, catalogues, maps, technical gestures and scientific vocabularies, capture a variety of artifacts, images and territories. Archaeology is driven by the desire for understanding the past through recovering its fragments, and resurfaces in contemporary art practices as a trope and an open model. Artists mimic and displace its operations to question the construction of historical narratives and the complex positioning of objects in time — their fundamental anachronicity.

The inherent freedom, or openness of the artistic operation (historically speaking a relatively recent feature) create a space for an anarchic gesture. Where ‘anarchic’ is not understood in a directly political sense, but as recovering and recapturing the inherent undecidability of archives and media. This also includes in a broad sense, devices of capture whose infrastructures constitute the background, which both invents and guarantees the truth status of objects. Such infrastructures are carefully negotiated fictions, the result of highly mediated procedures of interpretation. The architecture of the archive, the frame, the camera, or the musical score articulate visibilities or sound events, while themselves remaining invisible or overlooked. Anarcheology, then, engages with the multiple meaningfulness of infrastructures by transforming them into visual objects. This not only opens a possibility of unfixing historical objects with regards to their assigned identities, with regards to narratives of origins, but more importantly of making visible the anarchic aspect of apparatuses themselves.

The constellation of artworks included in Anarcheologies pose a question: what happens if the object-fragment itself is lost? Deprived of their usual functionality, a map, an archive, a score, a catalogue, a portrait, a film, or a travel through the desert, become an anarchic gesture. The artists perform the operations of removing, subtracting, erasing, amassing, or displacing, thereby inverting the usual claim of research. The works produce opacity instead of didactically delivering a truth. This highlights the uncertainty and randomness involved in doing historical research, which is intimately intertwined with fiction, with inventing the meaning of the objects researched. Two important moments result from this anarcheological approach. Firstly, infrastructure itself becomes a visible, and a visual fragment characterized by opacity. It becomes meaningless, itself no longer assigning meaning opening itself up to multiple lines of interpretation. Secondly, it is precisely here that lies the possibility for writing a critical counter-narrative, of considering those meanings that often remain outside the frame, of micro-histories, of the question of how we hold the memory of another, of multiple co-possible paths to drift through a musical score, or to touch the very matter, the elusive substance of film. Each work proposes a hypothesis of a lost fragment that it simultaneously constructs.

----Alena Alexandrova (BG/NL) obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam. She is a lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, and the Amsterdam University College. She curated Capturing Metamorphosis, an exhibition around the issue of metamorphosis situating media and modes of display between archeology and contemporary art, Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam.

She is the co-editor of a volume on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and has published internationally in the fields of aesthetics, performance and visual studies (Performance Research, Rue Descartes, Esse, Kunstlicht, Bijdragen). Her book Breaking Resemblance: Why Religious Images Still Matter to Artists Today? is forthcoming, Fordham University Press, 2015.

Dirk Bruinsma, Traces of Dérive (For saxophone, bass clarinet, flute and percussion), 2014 is a four channel sound installation based on Derive for Wind and Percussion, 2009. This is a chance determined composition for wind and percussion instruments. Its performance is conceived as a non-linear drift across the different zones of the score-map, and is only partly structured by rules that determine its direction. Traces of Dérive builds a texture of sound events that trace the performance of four possible routes through the virtual map. The four tracks spill in ever different combinations — meeting each other at different points — to create a constellation of events in constant modulation.

The printed score is presented in Anarcheologies as a potentially readable surface. It lays bare its own infrastructure, which holds in itself multiple and co-possible imaginary performances. A visual object and an opaque, anarchic apparatus.

Dirk Bruinsma (NL) is a soprano, alto and baritone sax, bass-guitar, electronics player and composer.

He has been active as a musician and composer since the early eighties, playing in groups such as Sumbur ten/five, duo Otolithen and Brown vs Brown. With his own group Blast (with co-founder Frank Crijns a.o.) he has been playing since 1989, touring Europe, USA, Canada and Japan. Bruinsma has been an active member of the N-collective playing in groups as Office-R, DBO and the N-ensemble, and in 2011 he was involved in the project ‘Critical band’ of the Norwegian group Lemur. Since 2010 he is a member of the Bigtet Tetzepi. In 2011 he was commissioned to write and perform for the North Sea Jazz Festival with a new group called PumpOrgan. In 2012 he joined the composers collective Monotak in 2012 produced several concerts with them. As a soloist he is performing on the saxophone using electronics, both in improvised and composed settings. Since spring 2014 Bruinsma formed a duo with dancer Mariangela Tinelli.

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Yoeri Guépin, Notes and Queries, 2014 is an exhaustive photographic reproduction of all the pages contained in every edition of Notes and Queries in Anthropology. Guépin binds each distinct volume published from 1874 to 1951 in a single book, where every page of Notes and Queries is framed with a white margin. The thick, giant book-object holds the promise of an archive tracking the development of anthropology as a science, its fields of interests, field methods, and the range of material that constitutes ethnographic artefacts. Yet, it remains an impossible, resisting object. The operation of reproducing all the pages without selection and the removal of the separation between the volumes makes it inoperable. Notes and Queries is an opaque archive that frames every reading as a chancelike operation.

Yoeri Guépin (NL) works with installations, (lecture) performances and collaborative research projects in which various archival material is re-contextualized. By introducing new narratives, he attempts to constitute new social relationships within knowledge production. Central to the work are questions of translation, in particular the communication of knowledge between different cultures, sciences, fictions and facts. His work has been exhibited at Ormston House Gallery and TENT Rotterdam, and he has delivered lectures at a variety of institutes. A graduate of the Dutch Art Institute, he has also participated in residencies at Meetfactory, Prague and LEOXIII, Tilburg.

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Gabriel Jones, Disputed Area 05, 2014 is a negative map. Its main operation is erasure, and its

effects are a commentary on the production and the contestation of identites of places. This gesture transforms the map of a territory, of a particular place, into a non-place. The map becomes an image, and an anarchic device, one that unfixes the identity of a territory it claims to capture. In Probable Improbabilities, 2014 we are witnessing a mysterious operation performed by the (an)archaeologist, one who does archaeology in reverse by burring a fossil in a place that could not have been inhabited by the animal. This displacement of the historical object, questions its identity as evidence. This creates a riddle, and a question to future archaeologists. The artwork, which will be completed only upon the discovery of the object-riddle, addresses itself to the set of operations and procedures that define archaeology as a science, and its future development.

Gabriel Jones (CAN) work evolves around such themes as pseudonyms, apatriotism, geography, science, archaeology, time and sensitivity filters. During 2010, in collaboration with Arcade Fire, art director Vincent Morisset and designer Caroline Robert, Jones photographed Arcade Fire’s album cover

The Suburbs (Grammy Award for Best Album Package, 2011). Jones also created The Pseudonym Project New York/Paris. He invited established and emerging artists, such as Robert Barry, Liam Gillick, Fouad Bouchoucha and Melanie Bonajo & Joseph Marzolla to create new pieces under certain rules (such as using a pseudonym until the closing reception of the exhibition). His work was exhibited in venues such as the Reykjavik Art Museum; Photo Espana, Galerie Chateau d’Eau, Toulouse; Galerie MFC-Michele Didier, Paris.

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Sarah Jones, The Time which Is, 2013 is a travel through a desert, in a movement without direction,

an anarchic travel without a goal, which is simultaneously a travel within time. The desert is as an open territory without borders, it spreads in all directions. It is a plane where the present collapses into infinity. The horizon is a figure of vastness, and it cuts our gaze instituting an impossible ‘beyond.’ The appropriation of a territory by the gaze that views from above, is doubly frustrated by the horizon and by the small digital screen. Motion collapses into stillness and spills over in an infinite finitude of a “flight towards death.”

Sarah Jones (AUS) is an artist, writer and curator. She received Masters of Fine Art by the Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands, June 2014, after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 2007. Through first person narrative, both written and performed, Sarah is interested in the desire for the dissolution of the perceived self in the spaces between the landscape and the body. She was artist in residence at Laughing Waters, Australia in 2014, and was the 2012 recipient of the Alcorso Foundation Italian Arts Residency for which she worked with artists at the Bevilaqua La Masa Foundation, Venice. Her most recent exhibitions include: Felt & Fa(c)t, Ormston House Gallery, Limerick, 2014 and Felt & Fa(c)t – difference to other, Malt Houe Stradbally, Laois, Ireland; The rise and fall of the continuous cycle, DeServiceGarage, Amsterdam, 2013; Come to Life at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 2012; You’ll Always Be My # 1 solo at INFLIGHT ARI, Hobart, 2012.

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Suska Mackert, The Andy Warhol Collection, Atlas, Eyes are part of the ongoing project Eine Ordnung des Glanzes, 2014. The works create several mobile constellations of material like press

images, catalogues, Mackert’s own work, text, and other findings. A key moment in her practice is the operation of removing or subtracting objects, details, and gestures from their contexts, retracing with precision their after-images. Her intervention in the catalogue of the Andy Warhol collection of jewelry results in a blind, image-less structure consisting solely of outlines. These evocative absences have an important effect — to bring to visibility the device of the catalogue as well as its infrastructure. By re-photographing such altered document-fragments she questions their status as originals and gives them life as multiples that can be included in many different constellations, spilling into many possible threads of thinking and grouping. This atlas-like network with an expansive, vertiginous force, traces the presence of jewels and gestures related to jewelry in multiple contexts.

Suska Mackert (DE) studied at the Jewelry Department, Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and completed her Masters studies at the Sandberg Institute in 2000. As an artist, her work revolves around various considerations and investigations of jewelry. For the most part, her work consists of the artistic transposition and application of these thoughts and reflections. In 2010 she was became the head of the Jewelry Department ‘Het Sieraad’ of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Since 2013 she lives and works in Nürnberg, having been appointed as professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Klasse für Freie Kunst/Gold-und Silberschmiede, Nürnberg.

----Alexandra Navratil, Resurrections, 2014 (sound by Natalia Domínguez Rangel) engages with the

history of film and photography, or rather with the pasts of their media. Her work, informed strongly by research in a variety of archives, is a poetic reflection on the traces of methods of archiving on the very surface of images, the history of the modes of production of materials, as well as their effects and proliferation into a broad set of cultural gestures. Resurrections performs an anarcheological gesture by excavating the depth that constitutes the very surface of film. It renders visible an aspect of the history of film’s own material — photographic emulsion and its

main component gelatin, which is extracted from bone until today. Navratil animates archival images found after extensive research on the German film factory Agfa and its relation to the German gelatin industry from the end of the 19th century onwards. Cattle bones were collected in Germany and imported in large amounts from India and Brazil. A key component of the video is a set of early images published by the scientist John Eggert who took X-rays of the bodies of the workers and the machines of the Agfa factory. They were designed to teach students how to discern flaws in the photographic emulsion from signs of fatigue, or injuries in bodies and machines. Many of Navratil’s works demonstrate an interest in the tension between the materiality, the weight, and the tangibility of images, as well as their disembodied, virtual nature. That is the capacity of images to float and migrate across media and periods of time.

Alexandra Navratil (CH) lives and works in Zurich and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, BolteLang Zurich, Dan Gunn Berlin, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, all in 2014 and at Kunstmuseum Winterthur in 2013. She was awarded the Canton of Zurich’s Manor Prize in 2013 and the Swiss Art Award, 2009 and 2012. She is currently a lecturer at the Institut Kunst in Basel.

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Padraig Robinson, Rory Test Model No 2, 2010 is a way of making visible an event that occurred in

2009, whereby a clairvoyant who met Robinson’s mother, requested that she send a message to her son from a spirit called Rory. A series of models sourced from the online dating site gayromeo.com, sit for a portrait intended to capture Rory. A ghost with a tragic history inhabits the surface of the portrait, ultimately installing a question at the very heart of portraiture. Portraits have a double nature of being a capture of someone’s identity and its effacement. Photographs are both documents of someone’s past presence (with all the intricacy implied in the word ‘document’), and an image with a fictional force, which always refers to and represents something else. I am a Camera (For Rory), 2014 is about the ghost story implied in all photographs in a sense, where the film engages in a search of a lost fragment, which is the dictaphone tape Robinson used to record an interview conducted later with the clairvoyant, who defined “Rory” as a red haired gay man from Bristol circa 1930, who died tragically.

The film reconstructs a network of traces, which are always traces of disappearance, stubborn fragments of someone’s presence in photographs, unpublished books, lost recordings, and parallel histories.

The film also includes a dialogue with American photographer Dan Kane, whom Robinson made a work in collaboration with in 2009, just before the event of Rory. Excavating a fragment means working with the delicate texture of memories, its re-enactment through an image, or its re-embodiment in the present.

The artist, then, becomes a recording device, a medium for the traces of someone no longer among us.

Padraig Robinson (IE) works on writing, research and discursive projects, retaining a strong interest in expanding ideas of sculptural gesture. The work engages queer histories, as well as the economy and philosophy of the image: not as novelty subjects in themselves, but as epistemologies that question or run parallel to ethical, historical or aesthetic hegemonies (which may now include the Queer itself).

In 2014, he began a monographic study of photographer Dan Kane, researching and editing a series of upcoming books; he was artist is residence at the Laois Arthouse, Ireland; and produced two iterations of the curatorial project Felt and Fa(c)t, at Ormston House Gallery Limerick and Malthouse Factory, Stradbally, Ireland. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Dirk Bruinsma, DĂŠrive for Wind and Percussion, 2009, percussion score

Notes And Queries On Anthropology 1874, 1892, 1899, 1912, 1929, 1951, collected by Yoeri GuĂŠpin, 2014

Gabriel Jones, Disputed Area 05, 2014

Sarah Jones, The Time which Is, 2013, film still

Suska Mackert, Atlas/Eine Ordnung des Glanzes, 2014

Alexandra Navratil, Resurrections, 2014, film still

Padraig Robinson, I am a Camera (For Rory), 2014, film still