Void Art Centre

ASSEMBLE I Andreas Kindler von Knobloch I Tom Watt I Tanad Williams I Amanda Moström

26 May – july 1

‘Architecture of Change’ explores urban ecology and notions of play through sculpture, installation, film, talks, and workshops. As a city, Derry has a unique history, demonstrated through its archaeological sites. In more recent times it has shifted from being a mercantile, industrial city to its present ‘critical’ phase. It has the potential to be something other than the homogenous cities which have become the norm throughout the globalised world where public space becomes restricted and movement through the city becomes choreographed through design and function. Retaining the significant character of the city is important to maintaining the sense of place. What we are exploring is the Derry ‘city of the future’ and how that is imagined through ideas of play, green spaces, urban design and architecture.

Void are delighted to welcome ASSEMBLE as part of this exhibition – whose working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public, and the process, by which places are made. ASSEMBLE will be exhibit a filmic work that explores the wider conversation around the importance of play within an urban context. ASSEMBLEchampion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as participant and collaborator in the realisation of their work. Andreas Von Knobloch, Tanad Williams and Tom Watt will work in collaboration to produce a site-specific installation for the gallery responding to the architecture and design of the Derry city walls, disused military sites, and the structure of Grianan of Aileach Fort. Amanda Moström’s work is centred on notions of play and the boundaries around the types of responses that art engenders in its audiences. Play can be subversive and potentially liberating, creating new social dynamics both within the gallery space but more importantly within the urban sphere.

 

The speed with which we witness the transformation of our urban environments is a response to the increasingly urbanised world economy. The city has always had a distinctive role as a centre of business, labour and consumption patterns but it is also a point of social exchange and play.

 

ASSEMBLE

 

Assemble are a collective based in London who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. They began working together in 2010 and are comprised of 18 members. Assemble’s working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the on-going realisation of the work.

 

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Andreas von Knobloch I Tom Watt I Tanad Williams – Collective Bio

 

Andreas Tanad and Tom, are three visual artists currently based in Dublin and Scotland. Since graduating from the sculpture department of NCAD in 2011-2012, they have developed their individual practice while also working collaboratively on a variety of different projects. Their collaborations are informed by an interest in social space, philosophy, landscape, materiality and architecture. Their collaborative sculptures are result of experimental exchange and are often constructed to perform in multi-dimensional ways – occupying a position between aesthetic object/ structure, the fit-for-purpose and elements of pragmatic usefulness. Their practice presents an ambitious interrogation of objects, environments and uses. Working with everyday or commonplace materials lends the works a familiarity while allowing them the freedom to be re- examined in a new and unfamiliar context. This method often results in work whose emphasis is on its production values, be they self-made or factory finished and a focus on the work’s overall coherent composition.

 

Andreas Kindler von Knobloch

Andreas Kindler von Knobloch is currently based in Dublin. His multidisciplinary practice is focused on ideas of collectivity and participation through the creation of structures and situations that question our material and social relations. Working in a variety of materials his work often seeks to help out or solve a perceived need, in a way that feels both utopian and pragmatic.

Tom Watt

Tom Watt is currently based in Hopeman in Northern Scotland. His practice deals with altering the existing architecture of a space or temporarily assigning it a new function. He excavates spaces that are closed off from regular usage and lie outside of the frame of visible functionality. His interests lie in the gap that exists between our understanding of the space that we dwell in and these other spaces, which co-exist alongside us. Watt plays with uncovering these spaces, and their properties of silence and invisibility, re-purposing them through actions and built extensions.

Tanad Williams

Tanad Williams currently based in Dublin. Works with philosophically engaged objects, dialogues and texts. Rooted in academic research and linguistic investigation, the final object is constructed so as to represent both its material reality and its theoretical conception. He is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance, texts, objects both in his solo practice and his collaborative projects.

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Amanda Moström

Amanda Moström was born in Umeå and now lives in London. She graduated Fine Art Sculpture from City and Guilds in 2016. Recent shows include ‘Doing it in the park, doing it after dark’ at Castor Projects, ‘Hopp och Lek’, a collaborative project with Lucas Dupuy at The Kennington Residency. She has exhibited in ‘Bloomberg New Contempories’ 2017/2018 at Block 336 in London, before showing at The Baltic 39 in Newcastle.

Her work generally tries to be read as a tool for play or function of some sort. She plays with the use and values of both experiences and materials. Amanda enjoys making things that you can touch and she is always trying to work with and beyond an often static gallery space, to create encounters, and encourage mischief.She enjoys collaboration and addressing issues of authorship to challenge hierarchical norms.

Amanda often wants there to be a clear reference to a public space and to encourage the same kind of familiarity in how people react to, move around, and use such public spaces. In this way the gallery space can function – not just as a quiet, contemplative space – but active, messy and action-filled.

 

Void Art Centre

24 March 12 May

Rosa Barba’s work situates itself within the realm of film and expands into sculptural forms through the exploration of the physicality of film itself and how that plays with light and spatiality. For this exhibition ‘between objects in the waking world’ she is exhibiting filmic works that situate themselves between experimental documentary and fictional narratives. Her films are located within specific geographic landscapes, whether manmade or natural often times desolate locations not conducive to human habitation. In saying that there is ‘psychogeographical’ element to these works through her study of the specific effect of the geographical environment on the behaviour and emotions of individuals; this is demonstrated in her films ‘Outwardly from Earth’s Center’ (2007) and ‘Disseminate and Hold’ (2016). Barba’s film works are fictions based within fiction, engaging with the tropes of documentary film making to create this sense of the real and to immerse the viewer in multi layered narratives. She is also engaged in this idea of film as a form of writing as can be seen in her piece ‘Optic Ocean’ (2011) a printed film script exhibited alongside ‘Somnium’ (2011).

‘Optic Ocean’ consists of a large, untreated canvas on which a text is printed in a double silkscreen print in red and cyan, the spotlight illuminates the text which gives the text a sense of movement which plays with the viewer’s vision. The text quotes a film script based on the first science-fiction narrative entitled ‘Somnium’, envisaged by the philosopher and optician Johannes Kepler – in which he demonstrated a parallelism.  ‘Somnium’ is directly connected to ‘Optic Ocean’, as the text is the film script influenced by the short story written by Kepler that was published posthumously in 1634. Borrowing Kepler’s title in homage, she has drawn upon both his tale and, his remarkable achievement in establishing a new ontology of vision. The story describes how the earth is viewed from the lunar surface, and imagines the way of life of the inhabitants of the moon and its climatic conditions. In the film we see scenes of a desolate industrial port location as the narrator describes the constant construction of this new landscape. The location is in Rotterdam, a future harbor that will be in use by 2030, claimed to be the largest land reclamation project in the world.  The minimal soundtrack by Jan St. Werner alongside the multiple narrations creates a surreal storyline that merges fact and fiction.

‘Outwardly from Earth’s Center’ is based on a fictional society that inhabits an island that is unstable and is drifting toward the North Pole. The narration of the film by experts lends weight to the situation; long aerial shots pan the landscape highlighting its seclusion. In order for the society to survive they must work collectively to save their piece of land. Social cohesion is the over arching sentiment of the piece as well as highlighting the human condition of vulnerability in an unstable environment. Continuing her exploration of landscape ‘Disseminate and Hold’ is sited in the city landscape of São Paulo, a sprawling metropolis the film centres on an elevated highway that runs through the city. These highways were often associated with utopian visions of the future and an economic vibrancy. In the film we see a highway occupied by people and devoid of cars as the road is open only to pedestrians and cyclists on weekends and during the week on evenings. The road is named after the Minhocão (animal), a quasi-fictitious earthworm-like creature. Barba is interested in the relationship between the city, its architectural history and its politics.  Returning to this notion that the environment of the city can have an emotional effect on the people albeit it a subconscious effect. Similarly, Tony Smith famously described an experience on the New Jersey Turnpike; “The road and much of the landscape was artificial,” he said, “and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art.” That reality could not be described, Smith said; it was something one had to “experience.”

Barba’s observational technique permits us to be somewhat removed but also present in these landscapes. In each of these films there is a meta narrative that connects them, the sense that all that is present becomes the future’s past, archaeological remnants of times past.

Rosa Barba’s work is a subtle interrogation into and co-option of industrial cinema-as- subject, via various kinds of what might be understood as “stagings”—of “the local,” the non-actor, gesture, genre, information, expertise and authority, the mundane—and removals from a social realism within which they were observed, and which qualifies them as components of the work, to be framed, redesigned, represented. The effect of which her work contests and recasts truth and fiction, myth and reality, metaphor and material to a disorientating degree, which ultimately extends into a conceptual practice.” (Ian White)

Her work has been exhibited at institutions and biennials worldwide. Most recently, she has had solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); Vienna Secession (2017); Malmö Konsthall (2017); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2016-2017); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2016); Albertinum, Dresden (2015), and at the MIT List

Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015).

Barba’s work is part of numerous public collections and has been widely published, most recently, in the monographic books Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem (2017; published by Hatje Cantz) and Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space (2016; published by MIT List Visual Arts Center/Dancing Foxes). Rosa Barba was awarded various prizes, amongst others thePIAC, International Prize for Contemporary Art, by the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation (2016).

 

Void Art Centre

3 February – 10 March

Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalisation. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasises a multiplicity of realities.

 

The exhibition takes its title from the film ‘Every Day Words Disappear’ (2016). In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it would be better for the Prince to be feared, than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of ‘Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth’, asks in this film what it would mean to base a political system on love, rather than on fear.  In the dystopian city-state ‘Alphaville’, of Godard’s eponymous film, all words and concepts relating to the idea of love and affection have been banned. When actress Anna Karina tries to express her feelings, she has to reinvent the words, for the concept of love is foreign to her. Like the protagonist in ‘Alphaville’, Hardt suggests that we need to redefine the tools to act politically together. Hardt embarks on a journey to identify the transformative powers of the ongoing struggle to re-invent democracy. Within this struggle he understands “the commons” as an antidote against a society run by fear; an inspiration for a paradigm that is based on dialogue and cooperation.

 

How can we transform a society that is increasingly defined by a permanent state of war and cultivated by an industry of fear? How can we realise the paradigm shift necessary to move away from a reality that depends on the exploitation of people and the cult of privatising public resources? Hardt looks for an answer in what he calls “the commons”, by which he refers not only to natural resources, but also to the languages we create and the relationships we conceive together.

 

The exhibition follows the trajectory of Grimponprez’s practice from his seminal work ‘dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y’ (1997), which documented the history of plane hijacking from the late 1960s to the 1990s, set against the backdrop depicting a dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist, where the latter contends that the terrorist or bomb-maker has taken over the writer’s territory as he is able to play the media more succinctly. This piece was made prior to 9/11 that transformed geopolitics, to his most recent works, ‘Blue Orchids’ (2017)  and ‘Raymond Tallis, On Tickling’ (2017); two new films. This will be the first presentation of these films – as well as ‘What I Will’ – in Northern Ireland and the UK.

In ‘Blue Orchids’, Grimonprez creates a portrait diptych of two experts on opposite sides of the same issue – the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, the former war correspondent of The New York Times, and Riccardo Privitera, a former arms & equipment dealer of Talisman Europe Ltd (now dissolved), provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. The UK’s arms industry makes about 20% of arms exported globally. Many of the UK customers have questionable human rights records and there are concerns that exported weapons are used for repression, or against military targets, (such as presently sent to Saudi-Arabia to bomb Yemen). This film has a local resonance since one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers was once based in Derry. In 2010, anti-war activists occupied their offices, protesting their activities, which resulted in the company’s decision to close their offices; demonstrating the power of collective resistance.

‘Blue Orchids’ will be immediately followed by ‘Raymond Tallis, On Tickling’. In this short film philosopher/neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing idea that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves (despite applying the exact same stimulus to the skin as another person would), Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.

‘What I Will’ (2013) is a poignant poem written and narrated by Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad. The flashing footage of military parades and anti-aircraft guns provide the backdrop to her powerful voice, in a time when we have seen unprecedented numbers of people protesting against war this is a valiant protest poem.

Grimonprez’s works provides us with the tools to deconstruct and be critical of the mass media, the State, and the narrative that is driven through different mediums. We are living in complex times; politics are entering the realm of the surreal, the media landscape is totally transformed and with the acceleration of information we need to question what becomes normalised through the landscape of images that we absorb.