Abyss of Light

Abyss of Light is divided into three screens and into three acts, the traditional structure of classic narrative film. In the first act, all the images synchronize to form a single panorama of Bryce Canyon in Utah. In the second, the screens break away from one another into three parallel sequences wherein each projection shows the same one hundred images at different speeds. In the third, all three images synchronize once again to form a single wrapping panorama of Death Valley, California. The work is an ode to the American western, one of my favorite film genres. Despite my admiration, however, my desire is not to imitate westerns. Instead, I set up an abstraction in opposition to the idea of narrative, something that can be seen in all of my work. In Abyss of Light, continuous disruptions of the American landscape document my refusal to see the land as backdrop for man’s heroic conquering of the wild; instead I see it as a foreground, a subject to be contemplated for itself and for which wildness is a state of grace.

IT’S A GAME FOR US
“How do we perceive mistakes and flaws and how important are those for us?” Barbora asks herself. “When a human being experiences and errs, they create a protective immunity for similar upcoming events, which they will, hopefully, solve better. Therefore, through these fashion pieces, I tried to communicate something that disrupts our personal comfort. Although we might not be fans, we need such disruptions because they push our comfort zone further and make us feel better in the long run.” Barbora Kotěšovcová

マイケル·エルムグリーンとドラッグセットのエントリ
МАЙКЛ ЭЛМГРИН И ИНГАР ДРАГСЕТ
Collaborating together since 1995 on performances in their early work and now more on creating objects, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, raise in their interdisciplinary practice a set of questions concerning the spatial construction of the self and the enforcement of normative behaviours within the architectural frame. During the past few years, Elmgreen & Dragset have been working on the intervention and modification within the White Cube. They create awkward and often cynical situations with objects of everyday life, constantly redefining the familiar. These disruptions of reality are transferred to the gallery space, thus giving rise to new ambiguous spaces.

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.