John Akomfrah – Peripeteia (trailer), 2012
Peripeteia takes as its starting point two drawings by the sixteenth century artist Albrecht Dürer. The portraits are among the earliest Western representations of black people, their existence now “lost to the winds of history”.
A Smoking Dogs Films Production, in association with Carroll/Fletcher and the European Cultural Foundation.
Next you may also like to learn about how to measure quietness, by Christine Sun Kim.
And yet my mask is powerful (2016) marks Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s first major solo show at Carroll / Fletcher, and their most ambitious presentation in the UK to date. The project’s multimedia installations feature new video and sound material, as well as found and fabricated objects ranging from plants collected on location to replicas of the world’s oldest masks dating from the beginning of the Neolithic Era.
Drawing on a visual and aural lexicon refined by Abbas and Abou-Rahme in their critically acclaimed project The Incidental Insurgents (2012-2015), And yet my mask is powerful offers an immersive experience conceived as a counterpoint to today’s all-pervasive imagery of crisis. In this piece, the artists use the site of trauma as a crucible, a place from which to imagine an alternative narrative, informed by the past but turned towards the future.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
It pumps my blood with power
The clearing. We find ourselves in the wreck once again and then again. A perpetual crisis leaves us suspended at ground zero. The potential to radically re-imagine the world, so palpable only a blink of an eye ago, now tastes bitter in our mouths.
Neolithic masks found in the West Bank and stored in private collections are hacked and 3D-printed. Copies circulate in Palestine, eerily akin to a black ski mask. A group of youths wear them at the site of a destroyed Palestinian village in Israel. Becoming other, becoming anonymous, in this accidental moment of ritual and myth. Initiating a series of trips to possess and be possessed by these strangely living sites of erasure and wreckage. Only now, returning to the site of destruction as the very site from which to cast a new projection that evokes the potential of an unrealised time, not bound by the here and now or there and then. A parallel time that is not occupied, a virtual time that is not “our” time.
And yet my mask is powerful confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment, an apocalyptic vision that seems to clog up even the pores in our bodies. Taking Adrienne Rich’s poem Diving into the Wreck as the beginnings of a script, And yet my mask is powerful asks what happens to people / place / things / materials when a living fabric is destroyed. How in the face of such violence can we then begin to retrieve and reconstitute living matter from the wreck itself? The project uses the trips taken by young Palestinians to sites of destroyed villages as an avatar to think about the possibility of using the site of wreckage as the very material from which to trace the faint contours of another possible time. Materials are taken from the sites: plants, flowers, stones, bits of garbage. Other objects, particularly tools used for either building or destroying things, are cast into the work, either by themselves or projected into the sites. Caught in a play of scale, magnified by the video projections, these things create a disjuncture between the thing itself and its shadow, what is and what could be.
In its intersections between performativity and ritual, body and artifact, thingness and virtuality, And yet my mask is powerful begins topiece together a counter-mythology to the dominant mythologies of the present. A counter-mythology that holds on to our imaginative space as the last terrain to be colonised. The layers of images, text, sound and things perform and activate various forms of returns, flash-forwards and déja-vus unfolding in this gesture a dense story of erasures and reappearances, dispossession and resistance, the archaic resonating in the contemporary.
– Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Summer 2016
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are showing Only the beloved keeps our secrets, produced for the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2016, at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, UK from 10 September to 24 October 2016. On 9 October, the artists will discuss their practice with Tyneside Cinema’s film curator Elisabetta Fabrizi.
The artists are also showing a version of And yet my mask is powerful as part of NERIRI KIRURU HARARA, SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016, South Korea, from 1 September to 20 November 2016.
Basel Abbas (b. 1983, Nicosia, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983, Boston, US) live and work between New York and Ramallah. They are the 2016 recipients of the Abraaj Art Prize. Solo exhibitions include ICA, Philadelphia, USA (2015); OCA, Oslo, Norway (2015); AKW, Cologne, Germany (2014); and New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK (2011). Selected group exhibitions include the 12th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE (Recipients of the Sharjah Biennial Prize, 2015); 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea (2014) and 31st Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2014).
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Eva and Franco Mattes’ exhibition Abuse Standards Violations investigates the dark side of the Internet. In a new series of video installations, the New York-based duo exposes the vast amount of unpalatable material kept away from our screens by an army of underpaid workers, while offering a bizarre but telling glimpse into the lives of an ever-growing, dispersed global workforce.
Dark Content (2015-ongoing), the centrepiece of the show, probes into the Internet’s most secret corners by looking closely at the largely anonymous labour force of content moderators that has emerged with the rise of social media. Content moderators are in essence the gatekeepers to any material accessed online. Their role is to screen all uploads according to specific corporate standards of propriety: making sure beheadings and gang rapes don’t crop up in our Facebook news feeds, and nipples don’t surprise us on Instagram. Along with the major corporations that employ them, these de facto patrols of the Internet shape our daily existence. With each ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they edit the experience of our culture in the name of many different forces: political, moral, ethical, even religious. Once the offending material has been removed, it’s virtually impossible to know it was ever there.
Content moderation is for the most part a very discreet service as the companies who hire this workforce seek to present themselves as free and transparent tools of self-expression. The moderators in turn often hide their work from their friends and families, preferring not to acknowledge the kinds of things they are required to witness everyday. Over a period of more than a year, the Mattes interviewed a number of them about their work. These conversations developed into a series of video episodes – first released on the Darknet – with the interviewees’ identities withheld through the use of voice software and stock avatars, a further distancing from both the person and the content itself. Each video is displayed in sculptural surrounds made from mass-produced office furniture, alluding to the home offices and identikit office cubicles around the world where this work often takes place. Alongside, a new series of wall-mounted insulation panels are printed with corporate moderation guidelines that were leaked to the artists in the course of their investigations. They serve as a reminder that this act of filtering and ‘safeguarding’ is always a reflection of the ideology of the organisation commissioning it.
See Also – A.R. Hopwood: False Memory Archive
By Everyone For No One Every Day (BEFNOED, 2014) also calls attention to a new form of labour in the digital age. For this series, the artists used a range of crowdsourcing websites to give instructions to anonymous workers to realise a variety of absurd performances for webcam. The artists laid out instructions for them to follow and interpret. Once received, the videos are dispersed on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world. While for Dark Content the artists act as a sort of confidante, here their position is more complex, as their unusual demands appear to both entertain and exploit their performers. In the gallery, the placement of the monitors in the space is such that, in order to watch the work, viewers are forced into a series of physically awkward and bizarre positions, in a sense taking on the role of performers themselves.
In much the same way that the performances are crowd-sourced in BEFNOED, the production of their series Image Search Result (2014-ongoing) is entirely outsourced to the Internet. For each work on display, the artists have selected a search term from their personal browsing history in their preparation for this exhibition. Adopting an idea purchased from a fellow artist, they take the first image a search engine yields for that term and have it printed on a range of objects by online custom printing services. Once produced, the objects are delivered directly to the exhibition venue, where they are unpacked, exhibited and seen by the artists for the first time.
Eva and Franco Mattes share a long-held fascination with the invisible. In Emily’s Video (2012), they show a disturbing video sourced on the Darknet only through the reactions of its viewers. They’ve also programmed a computer virus (Biennale.py, 2001), and co-curated an inaccessible exhibition in the Fukushima exclusion zone (Don’t Follow The Wind, 2015). For the New York-based duo, what’s concealed is often what matters most.
Eva and Franco Mattes (b. 1976, Italy) live and work in New York, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include I Would Prefer Not To Include My Name, Essex Flowers, New York, USA (2015); Breaking Banality: The Dysfunction of Remediation, Feldman Gallery, Portland, USA; By Everyone, For No One, Everyday, Postmasters, New York (both 2014); Emily’s Video, Carroll / Fletcher, London, UK (2013); Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable, Carroll / Fletcher, London (2012); and Lies Inc., Site Gallery, Sheffield (2011). Group shows and biennials include the 20th Biennale of Sydney (as part of Don’t Follow the Wind), Sydney, Australia; Electronic Superhighway and Artists’ Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London (all 2016); Big Bang Data, Somerset House, London; 2050. A Brief History of the Future, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (both 2015); Performa, New York; MoMA PS1, New York (both 2009), New Museum, New York (2005); NTT ICC Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2004); Manifesta, Frankfurt (2002); and the Venice Biennale (2001). In 2016, they were recipients of the Creative Capital Award.
Carroll / Fletcher supports established and emerging artists whose work transcends traditional categorisation, using diverse media in order to explore socio-political or technological themes. From rising talents such as Constant Dullaart, Mishka Henner, and Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, to interactive installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and computer art pioneer Manfred Mohr, the gallery represents an international range of artists who use interdisciplinary research and broad means to produce work that reflects on and provides insight into contemporary culture.
To download a pdf of the press release, click here.
The birth of conceptual art has long been associated with the collapse of the gold standard in 1971. With one decision, the value of the dollar was no longer backed by the intrinsic value of a physical commodity, but instead became immaterial, opening financial markets up to greater speculation and volatility. At the same time, contemporary artists adopted similar tactics, distancing themselves from objects in order to avoid the forces of the market. Yet, these market forces are all-pervasive. With each downturn and recession, it has become ever more apparent that a handful of investment banks and corporations hold immense power over our everyday lives. Neoliberal Lulz brings together work by five artists who interrogate this relationship and respond by adopting corporate strategies to their own ends.
Constant Dullaart’s business DullTech™ exists as a fully-fledged technology start-up. The DullTech™ Media Player is, in the words of its inventor, a ‘smart, hassle-free, plug-and-play USB-friendly media player that works on all screens and syncs without problems or cables.’ Conceived in 2012 during the artist’s residency at OCAT Shenzhen, China, DullTech™ grew out of a frustration with the common difficulty for syncing video files across diverse hardware. Dullaart decided it was time for a media player that could make life simple, one box which could ‘get rid of remote controls, expensive AV professionals, stress and drama.’ DullTech™ is at once both a hardware start-up and a performative artwork. It creates technologically simplified or ‘DULL’ products as a form of radical corporate production, both in tune with and subverting this age of high-efficiency capitalism. A retort also to the rise of ‘cool-hunting’, which sees industry stealing creative ideas from artists and pitching them back as trends, Dullaart’s ‘DULL’ technology circumvents this dynamic from the outset. The artist is at once the creative, developer, marketeer, and venture capitalist, placed to cash in on any commercial success.
Going one step further, Jennifer Lyn Morone has incorporated her person as a registered company Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, with 10,000 shares available for purchase on the occasion of the exhibition. Corporations enjoy many human rights and have a variety of privileges not extended to individuals, and so Morone has addressed this imbalance by engineering a new business model for her own ‘human corporation’. Describing the contemporary condition as one of ‘data slavery’, Morone responds to the multi-billion dollar personal data industry by reclaiming the individual’s right to the data they produce. JLM™ Inc is currently developing a software called DOME (Database Of ME) which will allow users to collect, track, analyse and monetise the data they generate. Taking direct ownership over her own personal data, Morone offers it for sale in categories including demographic, lifestyle or health, among others. Her identity is also fully branded, with trademarks applying to not only the company name but also the smile, sound, gait and image of Jennifer Lyn Morone. As the business grows, JLM™ Inc looks to capitalise on a variety of other possibilities for corporate revenue through its subsidiary companies, ranging from a line of cosmetics made in Morone’s biometric likeness to marketing the artist’s organs. While this approach may appear as playful satire, it is made all the more sobering by the fact that each of these ideas are entirely possible within the prevailing corporate environment and reflect existing industries and markets. At Carroll / Fletcher, JLM™ Inc will debut a ‘Behind the Scenes’ film showing the inner workings of the corporation, as well as a manual educating readers on how they might become Incorporated too.
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion’s Untitled SAS (2015) takes its name from ‘société par actions simplifiées’, the French equivalent of a registered limited company, much like ‘Ltd.’ or ‘Inc.’ in English. A limited company with ‘work of art’ as its sole corporate mission, the work’s only physical manifestations are its certificate of incorporation and share register. Indeed, Untitled SAS‘s corporate capital is readily available in the form of 10,000 shares for purchase online. Having bought into a company-cum-artwork, each shareholder is at once an investor and a collector, and as such is able to trade shares at the price they have set and influence both the company and artwork’s overall value. In this sense, this fully functional corporate shell performs and mirrors the art market, where the value of a work of art resides in its cultural capital, and in the ability of invested parties to manipulate it to their will.
Les Nouveaux chercheurs d’or (The New Gold Diggers) (2015) is a series of samples of artificial gold products obtained for free online by the artists posing as a company. These items that may appear precious but have little intrinsic value, are part of the artists’ research into ideas of worth and wealth creation. From the extensive description printed beneath each sample, it becomes clear that each one has required huge amounts of technical and human resources to produce, often passing through several different countries in the process. Adopting an approach similar to that of an archaeologist or naturalist, the artists track the way in which luxury is fantasised and consumed.
See Also – Manfred Mohr: Artificiata II
Striking at the core of the capitalist system, Femke Herregraven investigates how financial markets shape demand. Infinite Capacity Al13 (2015) reveals the warehouses where huge volumes of aluminium were stored by investment banks to allegedly enable financial speculation. An array of works also explore the phenomenon of High Frequency Trading, described by the artist as ‘one of the most opaque, automated and sped-up processes of the present moment’. A three-part series, A timeframe of one second is a lifetime of trading (2013-16) draws attention to the speed of these transactions, the semiotics of the naming of such algorithms, and maps the dissemination of such trades over time. Rogue Waves (2015) is a series of metal sticks, laser-cut with the outline of a trading pattern in which algorithms illegally manipulated financial markets. Drawing on ancient trading customs, the form references the tradition of the tally stick, bones or wooden batons once used to record value and transactions. Finally, an online game Taxodus (2012-13) invites visitors to weigh their options and try their hand at offshore investment and global citizenship in order to avoid taxation and become elite players in the world economy.
Constant Dullaart (b. 1979, Leiderdorp, Netherlands) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include Jennifer in Paradise, Futura, Prague; The Censored Internet, Aksioma, Ljubljana (both 2015); Stringendo, Vanishing Mediators at Carroll / Fletcher, London; Brave New Panderers, XPO gallery, Paris (both 2014); Jennifer in Paradise, Future Gallery, Berlin; Jennifer in Paradise, Import Projects, Berlin (2013) and Onomatopoeia, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2012). Group exhibitions include Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Follow, FACT, Liverpool, UK; Then They Form Us, MCA, Santa Barbara; When I Give, I Give Myself, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (both 2015); Evil Clowns, HMKV, Dortmund, Germany (2014) and Online/Offline/Encoding Everyday Life, transmediale Festival, Berlin (2014). He lives and works between Berlin and Amsterdam.
Femke Herregraven (b. 1982, Nijmegen, Netherlands) holds a BA from Artez Academy, Arnhem and an MA from the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Solo shows include Schizophrenic Assets at V4ult Gallery, Berlin (2013) and New Order, Mediamatic, Amsterdam (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Globale Infosphere, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Algorithmic Rubbish: Daring to Defy Misfortune, SMBA, Amsterdam; Extension du domaine du jeu, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art In The Age of…Planetary Computation, Witte de With, Rotherdam; All of This Belongs to You, V&A Museum, London (all 2015); and online as part of the Extinction Marathon, Serpentine Galleries, London (2014). She currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion (b. 1984 and 1982, Lorraine, France) both studied at the Higher Schools of Art of Nancy and Aix-en-Provence. Solo shows include Les Nouveaux chercheurs d’or, 22,48 m2, Paris (2015); Google Earth Movies, FRAC Aquitane, Labatut, France (2014); and Dérives, 22,48 m2, Paris (2013). Recent group exhibitions include The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies, Furtherfield Gallery, London (2015); Inside/Peer to Peer, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Unoriginal Genius, Carroll / Fletcher, London (both 2014); and Jeune Création, Centquatre, Paris (2013). They live and work in Vincennes, France.
Jennifer Lyn Morone (b. 1979, New York, USA) holds a BFA in sculpture from SUNY Purchase and the Pratt Institute, New York and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent group exhibitions include Globale: Infosphere, ZKM, Karlsruhe; The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies, Furtherfield Gallery, London; Algorithmic Rubbish: Daring to Defy Misfortune, SMBA, Amsterdam; Data Rush, Noorderlicht Photography Festival, Groningen; Poetics and Politics of Data, HeK, Basel; Lifelogging, Science Gallery, Dublin; and Capture All, transmediale Festival, Berlin (all 2015). She currently lives and works between the USA, UK and Germany.
To download the press release, please click here.
12 February – 2 April 2016
For his second exhibition at Carroll / Fletcher, digital art pioneer Manfred Mohr presents a series of new pieces mapping his formal investigations of theoretical space in generative screen-based works, drawings, and inkjet paintings.
One of the very first artists ever to produce drawings on a computer, Mohr originally trained as a painter, and has made rigorously minimal paintings and drawings since the late 1950s. Abstract Expressionism informed his early works, but the artist rapidly grew suspicious of the lack of control inherent to most expressionist practices. Inspired by philosopher Max Bense’s thinking that a ‘clear and logical’ form of art making was possible – and indeed desirable – Mohr began to develop what he called a ‘programmed aesthetic’ while based in Paris in the 1960s. He soon introduced algorithms and formal rules to his painting process in order to generate artworks that conveyed his vision in a more rational way. During the same period, he met composer Pierre Barbaud, known for his role in shaping early ‘algorithmic music,’ an encounter that alerted him to the artistic possibilities afforded by then-fledgling computer technologies.
The events of May 1968 radically changed Mohr’s access to these new tools. As universities opened to all in the aftermath of student and worker protests in Paris, the artist was able to use a computer at the University of Vincennes. Drawings – executed by hand but calculated on a machine – shortly followed. The first computer drawings produced with Mohr’s computer programs were made on a light-plotter at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1969.
These first experiments set Mohr on a path that he has followed to this day, despite the art world’s resistance to the idea of the computer as a legitimate art medium. Soon after the early Vincennes works, he was granted access to one of the first computer-driven drawing machines – a Benson flatbed plotter – at the Paris Institute of Meteorology. At night, after the engineers went home, Mohr was able to use the large CDC computer and this plotter to give shape to his experiments working with computer programs, and to develop a controlled system, which enabled new visual forms founded on the algorithms he had written. The artist was offered his first museum exhibition at ARC – Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – in 1971, a watershed moment, now widely acknowledged as the first museum show of digital art.
Music has always been a great influence on Mohr, a saxophonist as well as an artist, regularly playing in jazz and rock bands. In much the same way that a musician might play an instrument, Mohr found the perfect vehicle for his investigations in the geometric shape of the cube, the driving force of his work since 1973. He gradually moved on to the ‘hypercube’ in 1978, a cube of four or more dimensions, which can exist mathematically even if it is difficult to fully comprehend: a space that is unimaginable yet computable.
Artificiata II gathers several animated mappings of the hypercube alongside a selection of images drawn from this process, what the artist calls ‘êtres graphiques’. The exhibition is a continuation of Mohr’s investigations into geometric abstraction as visual music, which is inherent to his practice and emphasised in Artificiata I, his first artist book. Featuring hand-drawn pieces from 1969, these were the last works the artist ever produced manually. Artificiata II is presented here alongside the original drawings from Artificiata I. Exhibited together for the very first time, these works are a testament to both Mohr’s rigorous consistency and depth of research.
It is important to note that for Mohr, what is of interest is not the mathematics of the hypercube itself, but rather ‘the visual invention which results from it’, the way in which these highly rationalised forms are reflected in two-dimensional signs, to striking and endlessly surprising effect. For while the artist creates the algorithm, parametric random decisions built into his formula mean that he can never entirely predict the result. ‘My artistic goal is reached when a finished work can dissociate itself from its logical content and stand convincingly as an independent abstract entity’, he says.
Explored through the medium of painting, blocks of colour create tension fields of push and pull, generating a visual unrest. The computer, as an extension of the artist, allows Mohr to reach higher forms of human expression, filtered through algorithmic code. In the words of computer art theorist Frieder Nake, each piece functions as ‘a grand confrontation with the bounds of perception and the boundlessness of the mind’.
Manfred Mohr’s work is also presented in the exhibition Electronic Superhighway curated by Omar Kholeif at Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Manfred Mohr (b. 1938, Pforzheim, Germany) lives and works in New York, USA. Selected solo exhibitions include Artificiata II, bitforms, New York (2015); The Algorithm of Manfred Mohr. 1963−now, ZKM – Media Museum, Karlsruhe (2013); one and zero, Carroll / Fletcher, London (2012); Kunsthalle Bremen (2007) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (1971). He has exhibited in group shows at prestigious institutions including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1984); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1980); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (1978, 1992). His work is held in major international institutions and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; and Borusan Art Collection, Istanbul.
More to read – Neoliberal Lulz: Constant Dullaart, Femke Herregraven, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, and Jennifer Lyn Morone
“…our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
“In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened”
Professor Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (1979)
Based upon fascinating scientific research that demonstrates how susceptible we are to false memories, A.R. Hopwood’s False Memory Archive at The Freud Museum London and Carroll / Fletcher London features new collaborative artworks and a unique collection of vivid personal accounts of things that never really happened.
Including a series of large-scale photographs of damage caused to the walls of the Freud Museum by previous art exhibitions and featuring an exchange with a fictional security guard, the project evocatively reflects on the way we creatively reconstruct our sense of the past, while providing insight into the often humorous, obscure and uncomfortable things people have misremembered.
Supported by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust, The False Memory Archive at Carroll / Fletcher’s new project space will be a series of works developed by Hopwood in collaboration with experimental psychologists, members of the public and a cast of fictional characters that reflect on the history and consequences of false memory research.
Related – Eva and Franco Mattes: Abuse Standards Violations
At a parallel exhibition at The Freud Museum London, Hopwood will present new site-specific works made at the museum, including looped night-vision video footage taken from the inside of Freud’s personal lift and a film of a FaceTime conversation between two actors who have memorised a number of false memories submitted by the public to the archive. The site of Freud’s former home in Hampstead – an atmospheric interior that evokes a seductive memory of his life and work – has provided the most potent of contexts for a project that seeks to explore the veracity of our own autobiographical memories.
The False Memory Archive examines what role artists can play in representing scientific information to the public, whilst presenting research into false memory as a potent signifier for our times.
The national tour is curated by Gill Hedley and supported by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England.
Notes to Editors
i) A.R. Hopwood was awarded a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship in 2013 – the first artist to receive such an accolade. This award resulted from the touring of The False Memory Archive and an ongoing residency at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Professor Christopher French, a leading academic in the field. Since 2002 Hopwood has also worked under the guise of the WITH Collective, creating playful conceptual artworks that explore the idea of ‘experiential offsetting’ through a series of 60 Solutions, including constructing a more traumatic past for you, rehearsing your death on your behalf and attempting to contact you after you die. www.withyou.co.uk
ii) The False Memory Archive is funded by a Small Arts Award grant from Wellcome Trust and a National Touring grant from Arts Council England. It is sponsored by Vicon Revue & Ilford and has been supported by Goldsmiths College. Touring partners for The False Memory Archive include; The Mead Gallery University of Warwick, The Exchange Penzance, The University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery and The Freud Museum London.
iii) Contribute your own false or non-believed memories to the archive through the project website www.falsememoryarchive.com
iv) The Construction Of Memory
A conference in association with The False Memory Archive exhibition at The Freud Museum
Saturday 28 June 2014, 9.30am-5pm
Speakers Professor Christopher French, Professor Dany Nobus, Dr. Fiona Gabbert, Professor Martin Conway and artist Sharon Kivland respond to the False Memory Archive exhibition by reflecting on the nature of autobiographical memory. The conference will also ask how recent research has taken account of Freud’s work in relation to his understanding of the variable nature of personal memory.
Carroll / Fletcher Project Space
17A Riding House Street, London, W1W 7DS
Website: www.carrollfletcher.com
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3 5SX.
Website: www.freud.org.uk
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12-5pm
Image: False Memory Archive: Crudely Erased Adults (Lost In The Mall)
A.R. Hopwood, 2013.
6 advertising light-boxes & faxed instructions.
Carroll / fletcher is pleased to present ‘stringendo, vanishing mediators’ the first uk solo exhibition by dutch artist constant dullaart (nl, 1979). Dullaart works predominantly with the internet as an alternative space of presentation. His practice is concerned with visualising networked semantics and software vernacular while adopting a political approach critical of corporate hegemony.
Foot and mouth disease (fmd) assassinates compromising dichotomous tuberculosis in tijuana in a effervescently introvert manner. The spatially assertive task force evacuated electric formalist abu sayyaf contentiously. Irreverent bacteria are consistently inefficient translation power lines, kidnapped by epidemic tendentious suicide attack commodifications, acting with outage as powerful appropriated social prophylactic recruitment. A chemical agent rioted as stigmatically contemplative nerve agent, similarly comparatively to anthrax bequeathing the newly out dated h1n1.
The exhibition features a new body of work based on the artist’s exploration into digital and online languages, the origins of computer software and technology. Dullaart’s latest works are partially defined by a traditional approach to art-making through the use of craft-based and locally sourced methods of manufacture mixed with internationally sourced and machine produced materials. This inconspicious shift in process reflects a questioning of ilocal and global platforms, whilst celebrating outsourced manual processes within production.
When tentative liseria coherently becomes a suspicious package device connotation kidnapped immigrations custom enforcement (ice), the federal air marshal service (fams) anthropomorphisms are perpetual home grown vernacular attributes. Intermittently serving radicals of hazardous viral hemorrhagic fever a dichotomy of vistas proficiently enforces the u.s. Consulate instigation to be recognized and interpreted based on one perceptual state. Yet although the norvo virus is the spatially secure border initiative (sbi), al qaeda smuggled progressive wildfire characterization, while the spatially political pirates of yemen secularity remains cogent.
Throughout the show, dullaart looks back to the infancy of the world wide web and the digital consumer age, firstly in a series of family photographs taken during childhood holidays in 1984, the dawn of the digital era, signed by steve wozniak (co-founder of apple), and through subsequent references to other pivotal figures such as john knoll (co-creator of photoshop) and bill atkinson (creator of macpaint, and inventor of marching ants, hypercard, and the drop down menu amongst others).
Acting as a prospectively negating metonymic violence device of the drug war, meddling post internet gestures. Although extreme weather functions mara salvatrucha phreaks international hyper local food poisoning aproaching with the sarin and the recitingly infectious pork of the federal bureau of investigation, the nationalist entaglement recrutier of homeland defence becomes disaster assistance referent instigating broader dimensions of meaning and pandemic mitigating. Disproving the standoff with the real, and mostly Public Tamil Tigers recovered their corporative weapons enthralled amidst condemnable gender cache, the suicide bomber educating the fractiously resistant barta cliché. Instead, the distinctions between background and foreground, human and non-human, culture and nature, subject and object, the planet and history have become transferable, variable.
Dullaart’s ‘jennifer in paradise series’ (2013 – present) redistributes the image of a woman reclining on a beach in bora bora, originally taken in 1988 by john knoll, which subsequently became used as photoshops first demonstration image. Once the mostmanipulated photograph, high-resolution versions of the image were never officially distributed and are now impossible to find online. In restoring the image, and processing it through current photoshop filters to create wallpaper and lenticular prints, the artist acts as a ‘digital archaeologist’, both commenting on the nature of onscreen manipulation and alluding to a time before this was ubiquitous.
Inconspicuously positioned within a memorialized time based reference marta and juarez, a.k.a. Sinaloa, evacuated pakistan, for the commodious post endemic epidemic. This sustainability enforcing drug cartel and for guzman i, nor arellano-felix and beltran-leyva. Barrio azteca enforced a strain of over conscientiously non subversive eco terrorism which body scanned intrepid misconceptions negating a mysql injection syllogism. Freshly wielded assassins educated facilitated organized crime, decapitating wavy snow and disaster by virtue of the national infrastructure omnidirectional approach. The port authority meanwhile distinctively smuggled emergency responding neologisms according to the versatile egalitarian pandemic avalanche of agency, considering the typhoon car bomb was the gun fight in the architectural real.
Dullaart’s exploration of the internet’s opacity highlights the extent to which onscreen data is controlled, enhanced, distorted, and often presented as unmediated content. ‘Terms of service’ (2012/14), part of a series of works dealing with the google interface, is a website that transforms the google search box into a mouth that recites google’s terms of service (TOS) and privacy policy, created by dullaart as a response to the continously changing TOS conditions of several internet services (the terms one agrees to by using these seemingly public and transparent services). This illusion of transparency is similarly emphasised in a wi-fi intervention, offering a version of the web where all content is displayed in capital letters, seemingly written with the capslock button on, referring to a writing style that is considered to be equal to shouting within online code of conduct.
In the extreme weather polemic the literally impressionistic proficient DDOS (dedicated denial of service) smuggled a refreshingly discursive botnet into developmental cyber security compilations, negating the taliban became a scintillating (MDA) mudslide discourse. Brown out, and within the twister, brute forcing the pompous engagingly bland tsunami. Erosion of the referent IRA (irish republican army) definitionally breaching the maritime domain awareness of the red cross sentimentality imaginatively propels human to human jihad gender exclusion. Nuclear threat facilitated the endowed influenza regarding the national guard, while the hostage and morphogenesis of the dialectic blister agent executed benevolently suspicious substance interaction on behalf of calderon.
The anthropocene discourse and its extended cultural and social debates serve as the larger background to suicide bomber reyosa engaging a disputatiously engendering and multitudinous serendipitous tamaulipas. Where was the proto suicide attack meth lab of cheerfully assert e.coli, lies the increasingly fractured and multiplied universality of emergency privileged exclusion, culminating target specific ricin bafflement of the central intelligence agency (CIA)? When principled privatized authorities plotted the emergency broadcast system, ice was brush fire and lightning was paradoxical relief.
Dullaart questions modes of accessing information, and the visibility and (MIS)representation associated with the global spread of information, through a number of analogies found in works throughout the show – from the recurring use of glass (a metaphor for the computer window – windows software, the glass of the screen, the internet as a window into the world), to a piano endlessly playing a series of notes resulting from a performance by Dullaart on the preview evening; and finally to the object of the balcony, a space that is used for announcements and poised between public and private.
In Dullaart’s balconism manifesto he states that: “the balcony is both public and private, online and offline. It is a space and a movement at the same time. You can be seen or remain unnoticed, inside and outside. Slippers are ok on the balcony. Freedom through encryption, rather than openness. The most important thing is: you must choose to be seen. We are already seen and recorded on the streets and in trains, in emailz, chatz, supermarketz and restaurantz, without a choice. Remaining unseen, by making a clearer choice where to be seen. We are in the brave new now, get ready to choose your balcony, to escape the warm enclosure of the social web, to address, to talk to the people outside your algorithm bubble.”
Reynosa organize crimes conveyed the esoteric shelter-in-place, while the universalist dimension addresses the largest possible frame (the world) a speculative culturally specific ammonium nitrate vaccinated the chemical spill of the DNDO (domestic nuclear detection office), the national operations center (NOC) and the center for disease control (cdc). Uncountably North Korea functions irrevocably expressive tertiary systems that are the cops of Michocana. When the crest, the presumable storm and the semantic temblor mutate into generalizing Hezbollah, the increasingly entropic Mexican army aids service disruption of improvised prerequisite symptoms. Ciudad jaurez was browned out when codified AQIM (al qaeda in the islamic maghreb) prevented conceptually absent narcos at fort hancock from drilling the fusion center of tuscon. Yuma was in iran, when agriculture was in the nuclear facility vogue. Agro was elitist in Afghanistan, when the ttp (tehrik-i-taliban Pakistan) was an emphatically engaging dispersive antagonist through Sonora.
The U.S. Citizenship and immigration services (CIS) plagued CIKR (critical infrastructure & key resources), when Mexico, Colombia and the oblique bridge blacked out. This is why inexpressibility accounts public health exercises as the stranded and stuck united nations (UN). Uniformly why smugglers of matamoros burst the metro metaphor with faddish precision. Illegal immigrants rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have the transportation security administration (TSA) phish the ricin subjective construction. Cartel de Golfo, the gulf cartel and la familia watched the PLF (Palestinian liberation front) hyper delay the plo (Palestinian liberation organization).
When post magnitude of the warning center infects terror and terrorism, the execution of the spatial intersection confronting the new federation threatened malware and the denial of service simulacra. Different perspectives and approaches affect our mental shootout in the computer infrastructurial decorum, communications crash initiate powder (white) and alcohol tobacco and firearms (ATF) collective durable initiatives. Curated telecommunications threaten the cyber security of seemingly new, technologically mediated Nigeria, while Somalia busts ambivalent sick Amtrak imperceptibly. A chemical weapon compiled of acrimonious scammers radiates aggravatingly above the value system environmental terrorist sequences. Eventuality forcefully engaged social media courting cultural branding into enfolding national security, but bart is weapons grade cyber command 2600 involution.
Presenting a timely discourse on the way in which our virtual landscape is shifting, dullaart emphasises how the internet can create an illusory sense of freedom. With more people looking at screens on a daily basis than at paintings or out of windows onto the physical world, he explores the material impact of virtual control mechanisms and questions the relationship between virtual reality and its symbiotic link to our physical being.
The keylogger is regarded traumatically unaudited within queer materialism parallelism. San diego los zetas are restrained from the dialectic subway discussion. Yet cain and abel attack the mexicles discourse, and the interstate cancels the extremist cloud? Before swat was team (dmat), the border patrol secret service (usss) disjunction was exposed to the radicalizing feminist border platform of the federal emergency management agency frowning upon the spillover of emergency protocol management. Torreon frequently retro-actively engaged with, and burned the world health organization (who) branding commodification scheme, when china and the department of homeland security (dhs) trafficked small pox contemplating iraq. The digitally native bomb squad of the conservative nonreciprocating air marshal federal aviation administration (faa) hailed the remarkably incestuous power outage of the nbic (national biosurveillance integration center).
Still transportation security quarantines the vestigial flood of regurgitating cyber attacks from eta (ekuskadi ta aksatasuna) due to manifold drug cartel tornados plumed farc (armed revolutionary forces colombia). And compulsive curatorial behavior pattern al-shabaab stood off of the disregarded ancestry forest fire, when the flood poisoned the existential rootkit consecutively. Where were the sleet and the tentative equivalents foreclosed by the first responder? Chemically burned by the intellectualist militia and progressive police aesthetics?
The insistent institutional critique virus of disaster relationist medical assistance scammed fundamentalist drug enforcement agency (dea), metaphorically negating the colloquial coast guard (uscg) exposing the border patrol secret service (usss). Exposed dialectic heroin ferociously reyosa agro terrorizing the administratively challenged basque terrorist enclave of mediation. Los zetas and the wmata loot environmentally challenged subway hyper developments where the enriched dirty bomb leaked the smart drug trade. Rigorously illegal immigrants spill eno liberal chemicals, value systems, deteriorate and contaminate the salmonella fugitive paradigm equivalents, while the central intelligence agency (cia) recalls tamiflu outbreaks in the nostalgically engaging naturalist pipe bomb, while the secure border initiative (sbi), drug administration structurally encrusted the airplane subdivided realities. Sarin security of the gangs and national preparedness for hazardous material obfuscating an incidental death shot reenacting swat. When homeland defence and homeland security spammed the immigration customs enforcement (ice), and effectively encoded their failure onto the very federal air marshal services surface (fams), in so far as the stage of emergency contaminated the subjective anti-structuralist team (dmat), the adjacent airport disaster managed inclusively privileged blizzard systems.
Closure lockdown for the hurricane and the radioactive earthquake retrospectively docked into the formalist biological weapon of the insistent inoperative condition consular, his conficker and the worm. If the methamphetamine disaster assisted the forged conceptual entangled southwest, the cyber terror attacked suggestively dominating the cultural implicit cyber attack. This is why the warning of abundantly sedimented trojan fired shots at the spammer in the linguistic norms encouraging hurricane. The cartel responded to the universality virus entourage with a conventional stylistic behemoth weapon because the bomb threat was an minimization explosion. Where was infrastructure security when swine and emergency landing infected nuevo leon, nogales and critical infrastructure? Geo political cocaine and marijuana in the nogales, ied (improvised explosive device) in the formative industrial spill. Ms-13 and aqap (al qaeda arabian peninsula) domestically nuclear detected the gentrified formation assertion customs and border protection (cbp) initiated before narcotics skeptically attacked the port.
‘Stringendo, vanishing mediators’ will run at carroll / fletcher from 13 june to 19 july 2014. Dullaart’s exhibition ‘brave new panderers’ is on view at xpo gallery, paris until 21 june 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘jennifer in paradise’, future gallery, berlin (2013); ‘jennifer in paradise’, import projects, berlin (2013) and ‘onomatopoeia’, utah museum of contemporary art, salt lake city (2012). Group exhibitions include ‘casting a wide net’, postmasters, nyc (2014); ‘online mythologies’, polytechnic museum, moscow (2012); ‘genius without talent’, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012) and ‘off the record’, stedelijk museum, Amsterdam (2009). Dullaart lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Illegal immigrants with nuclear ebola mendaciously engaged human to animal ephemeralities, contradicting the agent and his avian assumptive vernacular.
Incremental chemical gas sociopolitically engaged with el paso, while discreditably narco banners screen hamas, the cartel, the incontrovertible target, and the 1984 hamzat. Explosion of h5n1 gained the affective connotation hacker, with the implicative globalization negation gang, the subjugation drug and the contradictory narcotics on the border between domestic institutional discretionary security and biological flu. The national laboratory is not an physical or existential dialectic explosive, nor biological infection, but an outbreak of an explosive institutional device. This is why biological antithesis infection disproportionately proposes contemplative antiviral objectification incidents.
*this text was created by mixing international art English as described by alix rule and David levine for triple canopy, with a publically available 2011 list of terms used by the united states department of homeland security monitoring social media sites ‘to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture’.
Carroll / Fletcher is pleased to present Black Diamond, the first solo show at the gallery by Mishka Henner (b.1976) one of the UK’s most significant artists working with and interrogating the photographic medium. Henner’s appropriative practice explores the use and value of photography and its relationship with contemporary experience.
The exhibition brings together four distinct but interrelated series of work, based on the collection and mediation of publicly available information sourced through social media, the internet and drones, and considers the way in which these technologies are used by the government, intelligence agencies and corporations. Henner explains: ‘I’m exploiting loopholes in the vast archives of data, imagery and information that are now accessible to us, connecting the dots to reveal things that surround us but which we rarely see or don’t want to see.’
In the artist’s recent Oil Fields and Feedlots series (2013-14), large-scale photographic prints reminiscent of vast Abstract Expressionist canvases represent landscapes carved by industries meeting extraordinary levels of consumer demand for two of North America’s most prized commodities: oil and beef. Sourced from publicly available satellite imagery, the subjects depicted represent a systematic intent to maximise production and yield in order to satisfy extraordinary levels of human consumption. The result is a natural landscape transformed into something akin to the circuit boards that drive the logistical operations of these industries, and ultimately, feed consumers’ appetite for these resources. Shown alongside the photographs are a selection of research documents used in developing both series including geological mapping data of gas and oil fields produced in the 1970s and 80s, and used by petroleum companies to identify possible drilling sites, technical data, raw satellite imagery, and archive photographs of oil gushers.
Displayed on plinths filling the rear gallery space, Fifty-One US Military Outposts (2010) is a series of photographs of overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in 51 countries worldwide. The sites were gathered and located using data which exists in the public domain, exposed and mobilized by Henner, including official US military and veterans’ websites, news articles, and both leaked and official government documents and reports.
The exhibition also includes new multimedia works from Henner’s Scam Baiters series (2013-present). Scam baiting is a form of internet vigilantism which has flourished with the spread of the World Wide Web to Africa, South America and the Far East. In this process, the vigilante poses as a potential victim in order to publicly expose and waste the scammer’s time, by responding to their email and subsequently feigning receptivity to their demands. Henner discovered numerous examples of extensive scam baits online, and will exhibit a number of signs that various scammers were asked to make as a result of email conversations, negotiation of fraudulent documents and bogus websites. Documentation of this correspondence, including one particularly lengthy exchange between Henner’s associate, Condo Rice and a trio of scammers spread across Libya and the United Arab Emirates, will also be displayed, alongside photographs of the scammers posing with their signs. Sound recordings of the scammers singing popular songs will permeate the space, giving human presence to this otherwise virtual correspondence.
Henner is currently shortlisted for Consumption, the Fifth Prix Pictet Award. The exhibition of finalists will be on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in May 2014, where Henner will show a selection of works from his “Oil Fields” and “Feedlots” series.
In 2013, Henner was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography, New York, and shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. His work is held in collections including the Tate Library Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Portland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Mishka Henner lives and works in Manchester. Recent solo exhibitions include Precious Commodities, Open-Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2013) and No Man’s Land, Hotshoe Gallery, London, UK (2011). Group exhibitions include Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Plotting From Above: Mishka Henner and Montreal Aerial Survey, McCord Museum, Montreal; Drone: The Automated Image, Darling Foundry, Montréal, Canada; Views from Above, Centre Pompidou, Metz, France; A Different Kind of Order, International Centre of Photography, New York, USA (all 2013); Appropriation: Questioning the Image, Fotogalerie Wien, Austria; No Man’s Land, Oregon Center for Photographic Arts, USA (all 2012).
Download the exhibition guide here.
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This is the first survey exhibition by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead in the UK, bringing together a range of new and recent works.
Interested in how information about the world is filtered through the prism of the world wide web, and other forms of information technology, Thomson & Craighead play with this data to create poetic, compelling works that ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human.
Encompassing small-scale quotidian encounters, as well as works that point up the smallness of humankind in the vastness of the universe, there is a lyricism and lightness of touch that enables the artists to address major political and social themes from unexpected angles.
A recent work, More Songs of Innocence and of Experience, takes text from ‘spam’ emails and displays them in the style of a karaoke machine, accompanied by the kind of anodyne music favoured by supermarkets and shopping centres. The text derives from emails purporting to come from the likes of Mrs. Gadhafi or a successful but terminally ill millionaire, offering spurious financial deals couched in plaintive, flowery language. Thomson & Craighead are interested in the fantasies at work in the scenarios that these emails play out – fantasies mirrored in the aspirational projections of the karaoke singer – in which plain text on a screen promises an unrealistic wish fulfillment of the most unlikely variety.
A similar use of appropriated text finds its way into a range of works that pull the internet into other areas of life. Beacon, 2007 taps into live Google searches, the results of which are displayed on a railway flap sign. Updated at regular intervals, the continuous stream of words, picked at random from a global Googling community, flows like abstract concrete poetry, made solid via the very analogue means of communication that are the mechanical revolving flaps of the railway display sign.
In contrast, more recent works such as Belief use the vast array of video imagery that breeds in quiet corners of the internet. Graphing together a series of YouTube clips that show self-appointed proselytizers for a diversity of more or less recognised creeds – from the obsessed to the deranged – extemporizing on their personal faiths and fetishes. Between each clip, the camera pans back to show a Google earth view of the globe, and a projected compass on the ground revolves to indicate the geographic location of the next bedroom broadcaster.
This use of found footage, both visual and textual, is a common thread that links many of Thomson & Craighead’s diverse projects. Commandeering the words and pictures that float so freely on the internet, they acknowledge the various artistic and literary traditions that this collage-like activity places them in. Owing as much to the 20th century practice of the readymade, as to the visual poetry of the Oulipo writers, Thomson & Craighead recognise their sources as being an ephemeral products of the moment, but transform them into enduring timeless works.
Of the works brought together for this exhibition, the one that most directly references this mixing up of time is The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order. Using a complete version of the 1960s film, Thomson & Craighead have re-edited it so that every utterance is placed in alphabetical, rather than narrative sequence. Referencing the ‘constrained editing technique’ explored and developed by Oulipo writers, this representation of HG Wells seminal story explores not only this artful means of assemblage, but also demonstrates an approach to film-making that draws entirely on pre-existing material. These methods of reuse and recycling allow the artists to engage in a form of oblique story telling – one where meaning is implied rather than explained and ideas percolate more slowly. Throughout, there is a mapping out of temporal and spatial parameters, testing the boundaries of the knowable world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by David Auerbach. The essay can be downloaded here.
Over the duration of the Thomson & Craighead exhibtion, Never Odd or Even, localised staus updates from Twitter will be selected then published and installed in the gallery.
Micromégas postcards are available to take from the exhibition for free. The title of the work is inspired by a short story written in 1752 by the French philospher and satirist Voltaire, available to read here.
The International New Media Gallery is currently showing Thomson & Craighead’s A Short Film About War as part of their on-line programme. The exhibition and PDF publication can be accessed here.
Thomson & Craighead’s recent two channel installation work October, 2012 can be viewed as a single screen, on-line version on the Photoworks, Brighton website here.
A recent interview with Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead for The Creators Project can be read here.
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