Void Art Centre

Kader Attia | Duncan Campbell | Ali Cherri | Christodoulos Panayiotou

28 October – 16 December

Where History Begins, explores the complex relationship between material culture and historical truth. The development of archaeology in the early 19th century is closely associated with the categorisation of material culture, preoccupied with the construction of a timeline through which artefacts determine the culture of a society in a space and time. These materials have become indexes within the field of research and when placed within a museum context have become valuable evidence or artefacts evoking a history. This interest in history or preservation has been traced back by historians to ancient art collections that predate the museum at the end of the third century B.C. The museum as collector or preserver of culture has become a contested site for artefacts. The collection of these pieces is often associated with the colonial project, the construction of the Nation State and a symbol of capitalism.

The nature of culture is to be dynamic and constantly shifting, with a multiplicity of histories. This exhibition questions how we construct historical narratives, how there is no one historical truth, and in what way histories have been constructed through the colonial project and particular ideological contexts. The writer Édouard Glissant observed that museums have become more like continents and that they should be more like an ‘archipelago’, he called for a global dialogue that does not erase local cultures but finds the commonality in difference.

 

Artefacts that demonstrate the complex history of Derry City and its surrounding area, from the early Neolithic period (c.4000 – 3500 BC) to the Ulster plantation period of the 17th century are exhibited with national and international contemporary artists revealing comparative histories with other cultures. The artists address the difficult relationship between destruction, conservation, appropriation and collective memory.

Ali Cherri’s film work Petrified (2015) questions the fetishisation of historical artefacts, by looking at the value we place on provenance and authenticity. The current prevalence of looting and the trafficking of artefacts, especially in conflict zones in the Middle East, open a timely debate on the reconstruction and restoration of demolished heritage. How does this alter the notion of authenticity? What historical traces are deemed valuable and why? Filmed between Sharjah’s Arabian Wildlife Centre and an excavation site in Northern Sudan, Petrified takes a journey into the life of dead objects.

Christodoulos Panayiotou, Real Fakes (2015) questions this notion of authenticity, and what becomes part of the historical lexicon. The work is made from stones that were discarded from archaeological excavations in Cyprus; they become ready mades, sculptures that are formed through a process of creation and destruction. Within the act of digging in archaeology there is the act of revealing and hiding, as often times the site is covered over once excavated and in its becoming it dies returning again to this idea of the dead objects.

Duncan Campbell’s, It For Others (2013) is an essay film that examines how we understand certain histories through objects and how we assign value on material goods. The piece takes as its starting point the 1953 film by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker called Statues Also Die, which asserts that colonialism is responsible for the demystification and commericalisation of traditional art from African culture. The film moves from the appropriation of traditional art from Western Africa, to the death of purpose of these objects from the colonial classes from here Campbell moves to popular culture and the construction of historical narratives through images and objects.

Kader Attia’s film Reflecting Memory (2016) splices interviews with academics and medical professionals with footage of individuals engaged in solitary pursuits: contemplating nature, sitting in a church pew, and admiring urban monuments. The subject discussed is the phantom limb pain experienced by amputees. This pain is aligned to cultural trauma, the history of colonialism and the appropriation of territories, people and objects and the repairing of the past pains or traumas of colonies. In film theory ‘suture’ refers to the phenomenon by which the mind produces a narrative whole from the fragments combined through cinematic cuts, creating a semblance of totality even when we should know better than to expect one. Attia’s film deftly exposes how the desire to perceive a whole subject can itself operate as an act of erasure.

 

The works reflect on regimes of knowledge both past and present. Questioning perceived notions and casting a critical eye on accepted canons. Where does one position oneself when looking at an artefact, what does it reveal, what does it have in common with other contemporary propositions in the world? In Glissant’s theory of relation, what brings things together is first of all the connection between differences, as they meet one after the other. The basis for which cause ideas, identities and intuitions to meet, revealing to us the common grounds that we share. It is within this commonality that one finds the universal and where history begins.

 

Void would like to thank the Tower Museum for their support in the supply of artefacts for this exhibition and Northbound Breweries for sponsoring the opening night.

 

 

Ali Cherri

The Digger, 2015

Video – 30 min

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès

For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates. Although majestic, the wide–angle shots have no monumentalising intent: the beauty and extent of the site speak for themselves. What is playing out here is the possibility for one man to become part of a landscape that overwhelms him yet seems to need his help. Seen under the silhouette of a rock about to devour him or as a dwarfed gure spade in hand walking from the back of the frame, Sultan curiously busies himself from day to day to prevent the ruins… from falling into ruin.

 

Alan Resnais & Chris Marker

Statues Also Die, 1953

Video – 30 min

Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) is a film by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet that analyses European perceptions of historical African art within colonialism. It speculates on the spiritual properties of African traditional works (from sculptures to masks) and problematizes the Western commercialisation of these pieces.

 

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

30 June – 02 September 2017

 

Prime, the first solo exhibition in Ireland of the artist Camille Norment. Her work is often site-specific, sculptural with a sonic installation. What is deeply arresting with Norment’s work is her preoccupation with how sound affects the body and how it has the ability to allow one to loose oneself through the act of listening. Sound and listening are unseen, intangible and yet the vibrations can be felt as a bodily sensation, the experiential nature of the work is of prime importance. There is a universality to tone, pitch and repetition which is quite primal. Her research crosses disciplines, exploring the interconnections between sound, myth, taboo and science within the framework of art and history. At TBG+S, Norment addresses the windows in the space as a means to play with the audience – being on display, whilst being an active listener and spectator. The ambient noise from the street collides with the voices in the installation adding to the potency of the piece.

Visitors will enter the gallery filled with the sound of deep, resonant voices that form a pre-lingual polyphonic composition contemplating experience in the contemporary state of the world.  The texture of the voices is akin to a humming, a meditation, a moan, or a chant. Sitting on one of a series of benches, the voices’ vibrations are felt directly through the body – it is as though they are physically communicating with you, drawing you into their sonic and psychic sphere, evoking something primal, visceral, bodily and universal.

This kind of vocalization has been replicated in various cultures around the world from the practice of ‘moaning’ from African American church, to Tibetan monk throat singing, to OM mantra mediation, and beyond. In Ireland and Scotland it would relate to the practice of keening which was vocal lament for the dead. The sound could at once gesture to catharsis, a painful groan, a comforting meditation, or a kind of exalting orgasm. While drawing the body into the physical experience of the sound, Prime creates a constellation of cultural references that speak to a connectedness of sound, voice and the body’s experience.

Camille Norment is an American artist who lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She has exhibited and performed extensively in cultural events and institutions, including MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York (2013); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Transformer Station (The Cleveland Museum of Art), Cleveland, OH, USA (2013) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design), Oslo (2012). In 2015, she represented Norway at the Venice Biennale.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

February, 11 – April 1, 2017

Hilary Lloyd’s exhibition Woodall is presented as a collaboration between Temple Bar Gallery + Studio’s and PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image.

Hilary Lloyd’s work centres on film and video, while also engaging with sculpture, painting, collage and installation. Her films resist the conventional notion of ‘duration’, instead presenting filmic images to be encountered. They often relate to the urban environment, their subject matter veering between the recognisable – a crowded bar, a building, a motorway bridge – and more fleeting or subliminal images, which play with the processes of seeing and interpreting.

For Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Lloyd has constructed a multi-part installation in which film and sculptural elements are interwoven. Central to this installation is a group of new film works in which Lloyd continues to probe the architecture and ambiences of particular places. She integrates sounds and images in ways that challenge typical viewing conventions – sliding from interpretable scenes into ‘abstract’ formulations of colour, shape and light. Through a strategy of juxtaposition, Lloyd shifts between detachment and intimacy, abstraction and reality – offsetting psychedelic backdrops with casual observations of urban life. The films are integrated into a sculptural installation which includes printed fabric hangings, echoing and reframing the videos’ contents. Throughout the installation, the repetition of shapes and motifs provides a rhythmic quality to the work, connecting real-life visions with constructs of digital technology. Lloyd’s film works have a salient beauty and visual restraint, continually informed by an awareness of the mechanisms through which they are displayed.

As in previous works, Lloyd responds directly to the architecture of the gallery, energizing and subtly transforming the location. The arrangement of different elements in the installation ¬– projections, posters, fabrics, furniture – invests it with a sculptural quality, while also foregrounding the physical position and movement of the viewer in the space. In this regard, her work harbours a subtle performative element. Lloyd draws the audience through the architecture of the gallery and through the camera’s frame of vision, distilling and repeating her highly-attuned view of the world.

Hilary Lloyd lives and works in London. She has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2016); Robot, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2015); Balfour, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2015); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2012, accompanied by a catalogue); Artists Space, New York (2011); Raven Row, London (2010); Tramway, Glasgow (2009); Le Consortium, Dijon (2009); Kunstverein München, Munich (2006); Waiters, Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Projects, Venice Biennale (2003); Kino der Dekonstruktion, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2000); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (1999).

Lloyd was nominated for the 2011 Turner Prize for her exhibition of 2010 at Raven Row, London. In 2016 she received The Bryan Robertson Trust Award. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, UK; Focal Point, Southend- on-Sea, UK; Greene Naftali, NY, USA and 356 S. Mission Road, L.A., USA. Hilary Lloyd is represented by Galerie Neu, Berlin; Greene Naftali, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London.