Suchergebnisse

As I (re)write this, May (first 2020, now 2021) edges into another June, and pockets of our planet remain in some stage of phased waves of enforced seclusion—alone, together—just as others inch or bound into reemergence. I dialogue, Kinch, an exhibition that dances with James Joyce's Ulysses, was to have opened around this time last year, on Bloomsday, but instead remained airborne as particle matter till now, due to a virus that also spreads by aerosol transmission (and where certain sounds, when spoken, are more likely to carry quantities of virus particles) . Strange new media, face masks continue to implore us to take care when sculpting air into sound. Though some hundred years older, Ulysses speaks through air-oriented registers, too: literary mass carved from upswells and emanations of "wavespeech" telegraphed into language(s) sung, spoken, silent. An amalgam of English, Italian, and Latin, alongside invented phonetic code of his own, its shifting aural mix echoes the Joyce family's own migrations and multi-tongue parlance at home. (Triestine Italian was his danc- er-choreographer daughter Lucia's first language, and Joyce's language of choice, for it was "easier on the voice".) I wonder if this condition of suspension and long gestation that I dialogue, Kinch has tangoed with mid-crossing, of its not 'landing' per se, would "howsomever" suit Joyce, whose own verbal strewing predisposes slippages, flow, and forces that "[contravene] material borders". In Ulysses, terra firma becomes tidal when treated by him, just as airs and tides monologue as if mouths themselves. "Seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos . speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling." "Mouthed fleshless lips of air." "Muskperfumed." All matter is talkative in his cosmos. Certain works in I dialogue, Kinch tack around the book. Others tune in and transcribe its textures in tandem with Joyce's echolocational ear— amplified, no doubt, by a lifetime of worsening sight (note his eyepatch in Berenice Abbott's portraits), it drives a rhythmic feeling-for that moves us, episode to episode, wavelength to wavelength, across conversations, scenarios, and sites in Dublin. "Rhythm begins, you see. I hear." Enter Simon Popper's manuscript, Ulysses (2006), a reel-to-reel retranscription of Joyce's every word, reordered here in attenuated alphabetical arrangement like a heap of verbal playing cards. Absurd absurd absurdity ABU Abulafia abundance abundance abundance abundant abundant ABUNDANT . Haddington haddock haddock haddy Hades hadnt hadnt hadnt hadnt . Echoic ghostwriting (phonotation?) in spoken word affect, this text begs to be run as "soundmeat" through a voice. It even sits, on the page, like Joyce's protégé Samuel Beckett's 1972 monologue, Not I, staged in pitch-darkness save for an illumined mouth. Sadie Murdoch's commissioned works, saturate, "wet printed" black and white photographic montages, emit at different volume—dancing us by way of a muted daughter, Lucia, towards her author father. In H.C.N. (2021) (shorthand for 'Here Comes Nobody') and her Flush Poised series, Murdoch reperforms scant trace imagery, in its absentia, of Lucia's movement lexicon, best known to us in Berenice Abbott's 1926-7 portraits of her that Beckett treasured, hieroglyphic (voguish then) in fishtail chainmail. Triangulations in choreographic conversation occur, though, as Mur- doch migrates artist, poet, and similarly milieu'd scenester, Baro1ness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, into Kindly, Kopper-Spangled Star (2021). (Elsa's Cast Iron Lover poem appeared in the same 1918 issue of The Little Review that inaugurated Ulysses' serialised instalments.) Other works brined by the book encompass Tim Berresheim's cryptic prints of rail tracks; Sonja Blum's clay vessels, Annus Mirabilis I and II (2019), with inky neo-Grecian biro inscriptions of "technological rush backwards"; Toby Christian's reconstituted pulped paper wall sculptures, where paper turns in on itself in textile thickness; Oskar Korsár's loose figural drawing on paper, with a seeing-eye breast; Agata Madejska's au- dio installation out of which redacted political speech—strung together, in Joycean tangle, from Donald Trump's occasional emotive utterances at the podium—rains phonetic into a cloth listening enclosure as grayscale as Abbott's photographs; Katarina Spielmann's high-colour impastoed plaster panels that grow, it seems, from below; Joel Tomlin's found-wood assemblages, Moons (2021) and Amphora (2021), each tinged with heraldic undertone; and the author's own language-'painted' face mask mouthpieces, of Joyce's words creolized with her own: choreographic objects to be spoken through. Exhibition text by Emma McCormick-Goodhart Originally June 1, 2020 | Reworked May 10, 2021

Alessandro Albanese is pleased to present 'Burners', a solo exhibition by Toby Christian. This large-scale installation includes a series of new stone carvings made by the artist during the inaugural Matera Residency, 2019. Alluding to provisional, untraceable and disposable mobile phone devices, the title of the exhibition echoes the dual senses of innovation and redundancy which pervade the exhibition. Toby Christian's multifaceted practice incorporates a wide range of media including writing, installation, sculpture, painting and animation. Using text within an expanded sculptural field, he writes in an attempt to describe objects he sees, visits and collects - from rare museological artefacts to more quotidian, disposable items. Sculptural and wall-mounted works are produced episodically, made in relation to and stemming from his ongoing writing. Constellating around his detailed written descriptions are palimpsest- records of objects and bodies, plans and models for made-up places, contorting typographical characters and prototyped forms for living and working. The small-scale marble sculptures of 'Burners' speculate on the formal lineage of computer mice. Conserving, imagining and remodelling forms, these sculptures equivocally and simultaneously draw from the formal languages of modernist sculpture and contemporary technological hardware, with numerous anachronistic effects and surreal allusions to other objects. Whilst their varying ergonomic registers might suggest the advancing accommodation of a labouring hand through time, they also imply a less plausible string of images, where a hammer might lead to a diamond, or knight's armour to a dough ball. Shown within the display apparatus of polling booths dating from political elections of the 1960s onwards, the pristine, porous marble sculptures are housed in collapsible compartments which lend privacy to each encounter. The booths are covered in a patina of grease, graphite and graffiti. Inside, clusters of hesitant pencil marks, made prior to voting, surround occasional exclamations and messages for future voters. Outside, the booths display more disparate endorsements, where the commanding stamps of royal insignia and industrial makers marks appear alongside smiling cats and floating monsters. A text by George Vasey 'Bruised Stones, On The Work of Toby Christian' accompanies this exhibition.

A live performance and sound piece from artist Toby Christian, reimagining the scroll – at once a document, a record, a spool – through domestic archival apparatus and props. Taking Abigail Reynold's current exhibition The Universal Now and further episodes as its starting point, Christian extends Reynold's passion for and exploration of books as material with his own scrolling, archiving and mark-making. Christian uses laminating machines, projectors and cut-out figures to animate drawn and string characters. A laminating machine is adapted so that its roll of ersatz-celluloid is driven over the lens of an overhead projector. The effect is the creation of a slow-moving animated procession of frozen string figures, secluded in their plastic pouches. The forms are carefully arranged by the artist to explore the figurative, linguistic and political registers of cotton string; some of the oldest recorded storytelling devices in human history. The scrolling animations are accompanied by an immersive soundtrack, mixed live by Christian. Contact microphones attached to the equipment will amplify and alter the slow humming of the motor, as well as the masticating, grinding noises of the crackling plastic as it repeatedly passes through the rollers of the laminator.