In Early Events (1996-2000), Liliane Lijn brings to Summerhall’s 2017 Festival five narrative sculptures, exhibited together for the first time in the UK, that form part of a series in which the artist examines her psyche. Like shards of brilliant glass, Lijn discovers early memories embedded within different parts of her body. Resembling archaeological finds, the five narrative sculptures embody Freud’s “fragments of memories” and they seem to have previously been burried, bearing the metaphor for psychoanalysis’ act of excavating one’s repressed past. In a recent interview (2017) with the curator of the exhibition, Gabriella Daris, Lijn stated about Early Events: “I am not simply using fragments of my body as containers for memory. These fragments transform in my imagination to become parts of structures, buildings, landscapes, enclosures and caves. They hide and protect my past but because they are parts of my body, that past is seamlessly connected to my future.” Using highly original combinations of industrial materials and processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science and technology with works that stretch across a wide spectrum of interests. From her early Poem Machines (1962), kinetic word drums transforming written text into vibrations and influenced by her friendship with Beat poets Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, to Liquid Reflections (1967), works with light and water, and more recently, Stardust Ruins (2008), which use the immaterial aerogel. Her powerful feminist prose poem, Crossing Map, published by Thames and Hudson (1983) was followed by the series of interactive Cosmic Dramas. Liliane Lijn (1939) was born in New York, studied in Paris and lives in London. Internationally exhibited since the 1960’s, her works are held in numerous collections including Tate London, British Museum, V&A and FNAC in Paris. Lijn works across media – kinetic sculpture, film, text, performance and collage – to explore language, mythology and the relationship between light and matter. In 2005, Lijn was ACE NASA, Leonardo Network artist in residence at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC, Berkeley. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Recent exhibitions include Koans and Poems, a solo exhibition at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf (2017), As Above So Below, IMMA (2017), Beat Generation, Centre Pompidou (2016), City Sculpture Projects 1972, Henry Moore Institute (2016), RCM Galerie, Paris (2015), Images Moving Out Onto Space, Tate St Ives (2015), Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, MOMA, New York (2012). The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Gabriella Daris.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Liliane Lijn’s film Look A Doll! My Mother’s Story (1994-9) will be screened at Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre on Saturday 16 September, at 14:00, followed by a Panel Discussion between Liliane Lijn and Monica Bohm-Duchen, moderated by Gabriella Daris.
More info here.
SUMMERHALL 1 Summerhall Edinburgh EH9 1PL
AURAL LIGHTHOUSES
The history of Santorini in relation to its active volcano and its inhabitants’ recent memory of the terrific earthquake of 1953 have created a particular cultural and environmental relationship between each body and its potentially violent ambience. Catastrophes are often identified with impetuous, dense and massive sounds. Continuing to use Santorini’s caldera as a ‘natural amphitheater’ for live or technically mediated auditory (re)presentations, the Santozeum museum will host the Aural Lighthouses symposium from May 18 – 23, 2015, and exhibition from May 18 – June 8, 2015, curated by Ileana Drinovan, as a part of the ‘PSi 2015: Fluid States – Performances of UnKnowing’ cluster of events across the world. Aural Lighthouses will examine the role of human aural performance in making disaster sounds seem natural and fade into a perceived inaudibility.
Aural Lighthouses Symposium & Exhibition at Santozeum Museum, in association with Performance Studies international presents,
DANCING TUBES INTERVENTIONS
by Gabriella Daris and Gustav Metzger
Dancing Tubes Interventions is a respiratory kinetic installation that bridges the conceptual ideas of two artists. It consists of Gustav Metzger’s Dancing Tubes (1968/2014) and two interventions by Gabriella Daris (2014/2015): (a) addition: live dancing within the installation and (b) reduction: the veiling of the sound source. Using Pythagoras’ acousmatic technique, Gabriella Daris focuses on the effect that the pressured air and its sound has upon the hyper-objects of the tubes and upon the dancer; a conflation of human and mechanized dance ensemble that raises enquiry in the audience as to both the sound source and its ontological register as well as its allusive echo. Manipulated by atmospheric pressure, her ethereal body is in constant strife to dance in harmony with the unpredicted frenetic dancing of two tubes that hang from the ceiling and are connected to an air compressor; set on a timer, it activates them for one-minute long with a ten-minute interval of silence and stillness. The sound score is here part of the repertoire recalling the violent force of the element of air, the art of respiration towards the inevitable death rattle and the system of autopoiesis. Dancing Tubes Interventions explores the poetics of liminal space and sound by dancing in-between.
Produced by Square Knot with kind support from Santozeum museum.
EVENTS
Symposium 18 MAY – 23 MAY 2015
Exhibition 18 MAY – 8 JUNE 2015
Dance Performance 19 MAY 2015 | 5-8 PM
Artist Talk 19 MAY 2015 | 8-9 PM
Laboratory 20 MAY 2015 | 7-10PM
On May 19th Gabriella Daris will dance live with the tubes over the course of three hours. This will be followed by an artist talk in which she will explore Gustav Metzger’s notion of Auto-Creative Art and Auto-Destructive Art, her dramaturgical approach to deconstructing his writings (1959-1999) as well as her ambiguous application of the Pythagorean Veil.
On May 20th Gabriella Daris will lead a laboratory inviting the audience not only to interact with the installation but to also experiment with different notions of seeing, hearing, and of hearing unseen sounds as they are made visible, challenging their psychophysical situation by means of exploring the implementation of destruction by the natural element of air to a level of fetishization and in reach of transcendence. Experimental artist Julian Hand will perform live light projections using watercolors on slides, creating a lava-like environment that recalls Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1965).