Their Mouths Would Then Be Filled with Marble

at MISC, Athens (19/11 - 18/12/21)

Their mouths would then be filled with marble is a group project that unravels as individual yet interconnected parts at MISC Athens. The collaboration brings together a newly commissioned installation by Hussein Nassereddine, and two public programs which materialize through conversations, performative presentations, and a screening with invited participants. Engaging closely with the artistic scene in Athens through studio visits, the research considers how the exchange of personal recollections makes space for the meeting of divergent and shared histories and literary sources across localities. It reflects on the process-based and collaborative mode of sync residency, and brings together local and international artists to present un-concluded works in progress.

This prologue serves as a beginning to a longer undertaking on the limitations of language, potentials of voice, and transmission of sound. It is inspired by Clarice Lispector's 1961 The Apple in the Dark—a novel preoccupied with the inconclusive nature of language, and that questions how to verbalize experience with only a few words. Fleeing a criminal accusation, the protagonist Martim oscillates between fear and the desire for freedom. However, the story does not depend on whether or not he has committed the crime or will be convicted; what is important is that Maxim personifies the author's struggles to render her vision through the inherent constraints of language. Lispector's work says the unsayable and represents the unrepresentable; her story considers writing as both a possibility and a fragile act, like an "unsteady way of picking an apple in the dark, without it falling." She transforms the necessity of language into an overriding issue of her novel, considering how to narrate moments which cannot be translated into words while also speculating on what a loss of words can allow.

The group project builds upon these thoughts through Hussein Nasserredine's presentation on how to envision a place that is no longer present, imagining how to manifest it into existence verbally. This concept is paired alongside his ongoing research on writings that exist within the margins of canonical Arabic literature: specifically the practices and lost works of Abbasid and Umayyad poets, who were sent to ancient ruinous sites to translate the architectural setting into words. Here, Nasserredine further expands upon a record that materializes his family's village in the south of Lebanon, repeatedly razed by violence and political upheaval in the last century. The program itself borrows its title, Their mouths would then be filled with marble, from a saying Nasserredine's brother mentions in conversation during their walk in the village to describe how poets would pass on stories: They would carry what they saw on the palm of their hands, passing it from one person to another to commemorate these places. Nasserredine centers the conversation around ancient literary testimonies, stories and songs of places long gone, reimagining the shifting landscape through experiments in sound, video, text, and drawing. Fragments of the artist's past and research surreptitiously enter the work: domestic ambient sounds amplified on the village's loudspeakers and layered with an Arabic song from the 1970s to mark the destruction of his community as he knew it; the artist's rehearsal sessions of Arabic songs from the same period through subtle, rhythmic repetitions and tonal shifts between himself and his teacher; his father's life-long work of translating ancient lost poems and writings now delicately layered with the artist's vague memories of the bygone village. Nasserredine's undertaking is a quest to excavate one's personal and political histories, which have disintegrated through conditions of territorial violence, by reworking them into new configurations of spoken and written communication. With words and sounds, testimony and repetition, one can approach knowing an ever-changing place.

Again considering Lispector's enigmatic story, the transmission of information via the body through language is both a necessary and slippery means to translate a moment in time. Similarly, Their mouths would then be filled with marble simultaneously recognizes the impossibility of language to accurately depict how things objectively are, while looking to the minuscule and non-human means of transferring knowledges. Still, poetry, song, utterances, and writing take center stage in their ability to convey the in-between—the formations of meaning as lost particles of time. And participants complicate the project's starting point: Through varied filmic, textual, and sound acts, they explore the infinite ways language offers new meanings through absence, stillness, affect, mis/translation, annotation, and mythology. Along the way, the artists embrace in-between states and ambiguous transmissions while refusing the available vocabulary; they move towards unknown frameworks for thinking and expressing, looking for something else.

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Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner

at Korinis 4, Athens (3/11 - 3/12/21)

With Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner, the curators Lydia Antoniou and George Bekirakis playfully use the performativity of social gathering and the pleasure one derives from it as a starting point, with the ultimate aim of creating unexpected connections between artworks and aesthetics, methods and and artistic practices. They identify similarities and differences between a group of artists whose work has shaped critical debates in contemporary art in Athens over the last twenty years and attempt our own approach to collective practices of care.

In this moment in time, it was important for them to ask themselves how they find themselves back in the exhibition spaces, collectively. The gesture of gathering invited artists around a table, is intertwined with both the contemporary socio-political condition of isolation and introversion, and the fragmentation that has historically pervaded contemporary art. Oscillating between digital presence and physical absence, they choose to refer first to the already existing networks of collaboration in the field of Athenian art, their friends, in order to collectively produce common space. Through the processes of exchange and inversion of the hierarchical model of exhibition production carries, the possibility of performing social relations arises, allowing them to imagine a new institutional framework through communities and exchanges.

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I GOT UP

at Gb agency, Paris (19/10 - 13/11/21)

The exhibition entitled I GOT UP activates the formula used by the conceptual artist On Kawara in a series he began on May 10, 1968 and completed twelve years later, in 1979 following the accidental theft of his notebooks and the ink pad used to produce them. The I GOT UP series consists of sending a postcard to different recipients every day, indicating with an ink stamp the exact date and time of the start of the artist’s daily activity. This series, produced over more than a decade, should be understood as a work of which only fragments are available, like one of the postcards addressed to the artist Dan Graham, presented in this exhibition. The opening performance of the exhibition uses the same date and time as that written on the postcard sent more than half a century ago in 1968 from Lima in Peru to the American artist in New York in the United States. The exhibition will be activated on the morning of October 19, 2021 at 8:59 am for an exchange in the presence of a person who will have spent the previous night in a bed installed in the gallery. Access to this room, which usually serves as a showroom, is not available from the public entrance to the gallery, but from the private residents’ door of the building, Intercom Toni Smit, at the same number: 18 rue des quatre-fils. The exhibition, apparently presented in a domestic space, but concretely situated within the perimeter of the ground plan of the commercial gallery, thus underlines the disappearance of all privacy. Works produced at the same time as that of On Kawara or more recently by artists of different generations and origins echoing this series which has become a canon of conceptual art will be exhibited, thus forming a constellation which anticipates or relates to the current condition of our societies of control.

With among others Ei Arakawa, Eva Barto, Robert Breer, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Thibaud Croisy, Omer Fast, Serge Garcia and Terre Thaemlitz, Ryan Gander, Dan Graham, Friedl Von Gröller, Nilbar Güres, Mauricio Guillén, Tirdad Hashemi, On Kawara, Pierre Klossowski, John Knight, Július Koller, Guillaume Maraud, Pratchaya Phinthong, Marianne Marić, Georgia Sagri, Serapis Maritime, Pak Sheung Chuen, Cally Spooner, Vier5, Jeff Wall, Lois Weinberger, Marina Xenofontos.

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Anti-Structure

at The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2/6 - 27/10/21)

Taking as its starting point an immersive installation with works by Urs Fischer and placing it in dialogue with the work of twenty-one Greek and Cypriot artists of various generations and modalities, Anti-Structure explores the far-fetched realm of fine lines between order and chaos, stasis and flux, structure and fragility.

Coined in 1969 by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983), “anti-structure” is a study of the state of mental and spiritual limbo that is characteristic of the second stage—the liminal stage—of any rite of passage, when the novitiate is neither here nor there but, betwixt and between, remains enveloped in abiding upheaval and disarray and a preternatural void. Anti-structure thus describes a stage of perpetual transformation characterized by moments of dissolution where “structural hierarchies are flattened or inverted.” Whereas the dominant ideology du jour was that any such breakdown would result in anomie and angst, Turner recognized that in times of great happenstance, culture in fact reboots itself and new symbols, models, and paradigms arise.

It is not unusual to find such pockets of clandestine novelty simmering deep in the underground, the pregnant margins of normative order. It is in these lands of strangers and exiles, that one finds fertile ground for radical thought and very strange ideas. It is these ideas cultivated in the fringes of institutionalized etiquette that bring forth novel ways of dress, posture, and expression, attitudes that when fully formed feed back into the system to either break or make the mainstream.

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” ALETHEIA “

at Central Fine (25/9 - 19/10/21)

Disclosure: This presentation does not address the concept of Aletheia(1 ) as truth per-se, but rather as an unveiling of something that appears once filters, language, and voices are allowed to voice the ID.

Clashes are to be expected.

With every space, the calligram (2) announces a sense of pause and a threshold.

As one unzipped something, what was unveiled remained, inevitably, in flux. What was revealed wasn’t the material or the object (naked now), but rather, the tension.

Georgia Sagri’s work approaches the forces that mark a body, a body of work, institutions, the planet, etc, and their relationships. These relationships generate an arch that is constantly being crossed, acted upon, which, in turn, reveals the dynamics that remain in the terrain of the symptomatic, both in the body and in society. Through various mediums such as, poetry, video, painting, sculpture, drawings, performance, or one on one sessions that engage with the other as a participant; through writing or organizing political activities; Sagri constantly opens her practice, engaging in a Rimbaudian way, with the infrastructures of language/body/action and their potential to produce change, to resist the dichotomies that aim at division, levels, categories. The works presented in Aletheia are related to Sagri’s ongoing project, ίαση (pron. iasi), which refers to the time and process by which a body changes through illness. Language and its impact on the body, and its resonances, puncture and embrace what remains mobile, invisible, and elusive. This force, which is often perceived in poetry, marks Sagri’s approach to presences —addressing bodies in conflict, bodies healing, bodies of words, and their internal/external reverberations.

© Diego Singh Miami Beach, July–September 2021

Ed. Zelmira Rizo-Patrón

Notes:

(1) Aletheia: (Ancient Greek: ἀλήθεια) is truth or disclosure in philosophy.

In the early to mid-20th-century, Martin Heidegger brought renewed attention to the concept of aletheia, by relating it to the notion of disclosure, or the way in which things appear as entities in the world. While he initially referred to aletheia as "truth", specifically a form that is pre-Socratic origin, Heidegger eventually corrected this interpretation, writing: “To raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth." Heidegger revised his views on aletheia as truth, after nearly forty years, in the essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in On Time and Being.

( 2) Calligram (noun)—a word or piece of text in which the design and layout of the letters creates a visual image related to the meaning of the words themselves. In the current presentation, the spacing after quotation marks, before the word Aletheia, the space before the coma, and the space between the coma and the quotation marks signal the flexibility of the hinge, the opening, and the pause before the next term, and so forth.

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