The Dark of Absolute Freedom: Lindy Lee

Currently on display at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, is the first major survey of Australian artist Lindy Lee. Rather than presenting a comprehensive chronological retrospective, the exhibition—curated by Michele Helmrich—intersperses 48 works from three chapters of the artist’s practice: her early photocopy art from the 1980s; her works centered around her Chinese heritage and the notion of family; and her later works that stem from her devotion to Buddhism and Zen. Helmrich’s selection offers cross sections and vignettes that reveal currents of continuity throughout. At the base of the exhibition is a profound sense of darkness that is at the heart of all of Lee’s work. The exhibition title, “The Dark of Absolute Freedom,” is taken from a quote by abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–67), but is also based on Taoist origins, and it questions the notion of the absolute in regards to our existence.

Vocal about her difficult upbringing in Brisbane as a first generation Chinese-Australian, not quite fitting into either culture, Lee began exploring her identity by appropriating Renaissance masterpieces in her artwork, challenging the Western hegemony within the art historical canon. Her use of reproduction explores notions of origin, originality, “aura” and the role of the artist—concepts that were at the forefront of postmodern cultural debates at the time the works were made. While much of Lee’s reputation has been defined by this post-modernist framing at the outset of her career, her photocopy works in this exhibition also serve to reveal the artist’s strong interest in materiality and her obsessive experimentation with process that can be observed across her three-decade practice.

Philosophy of the Parvenu, 1990, photocopy and synthetic polymer paint on Stonehenge paper mounted on board, 14 parts, 30.0 × 24.5 cm each, 68.0 × 170.8 cm overall. Collection of the University of Queensland. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

In Silence of the Painters (1987), Lee has roughly, almost violently, smeared six photocopies of Rembrandt’s self-portraits with black paint. The near eradication of the images into pure monochrome is an obvious nod to Ad Reinhardt’s aspiration to avoid representation. Meanwhile, Philosophy of Parvenu and Untitled (After Titian) (both 1990), another set of works on paper, impart a sense of melancholy, as the ghostly faces of the subjects they portray emerge and submerge from varying grades of darkness. The rich velvety surface of the works are a result of repeatedly feeding the same sheets of paper through a photocopier.

Along the back wall of the exhibition space is a series of Lee’s encaustic works from the late 1980s, which break the characteristically flat surface of her photocopy series. During this period, Lee began mixing pigment with wax, which she used to coat the surface of colored canvases before arduously scraping off the wax to reveal the glowing images beneath. This Too is Heroic (1988), for example, appropriates a detail of a work by El Greco; the physically contorted bodies in the scene add to the sense of drama and intense struggle often felt throughout this series of paintings. 

 First Principle, 2001, synthetic polymer paint, oil, wax and ink on board, 20 parts, 41.5 × 29.5 cm each, 166.0 × 147.5 cm overall. Private collection, Sydney. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

First Principle and Traces of Enlightenment (both 2001) juxtapose flat monochrome panels with imagery of what Lee refers to as “splat paintings.” Borrowed from ancient Chinese Buddhist traditions, Lee’s “splat paintings” mimic the practice of flung-ink paintings, in which monks would mediate for a period of time before throwing a cup of ink on paper. The resulting patterns were believed to be the absolute culmination of all existing conditions in the universe and a record of the energy of the cosmos. 

Cosmos - A Life of Fire, 2014. Bronze overall 300.0 cm diam. Collection of the artist. Reproduced courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Elsewhere in the show is the large installation Birth and Death (2007), which comprises nearly 100 accordion books extended across the museum floor in zigzagging, disjointed rows. The collective mass of black-and-red faces depicted on the books are made up of inkjet reproductions of Lee’s family photographs—an attempt to connect to her Chinese ancestry by linking together five generations across time and space.

Lee’s recent works see a retreat from representation, or the external appearance of things. Reaching an almost transcendental point, her practice has become as much about the meditative ritual of process as it is about the result. Stylistically, Lee’s characteristic bold use of red, ultramarine blue, orange and green has now given way to a softer, more neutral palate.

Included in the exhibition are suspended scroll-like sheets of heavyweight paper and metal, riddled with a slew of burn holes. The constellation of shadows created as a result of the holes, which project onto the wall beneath, seems to invite the viewer to look at what is beyond the immediate surface of Lee’s works. Inspired by the almighty forces of the Earth’s elements, the idea for the work came from an artist residency in Malaysia, in which heavy rain physically pierced the paper that Lee had laid out on the ground. For the past few years, Lee has worked almost exclusively with the elements of fire and water.

Drawing on her earlier flung-ink and wax paintings, Lee’s newest works are a series of flickering bronze sculptures, which dance in the light like flames. The organic forms were created by hurling searing molten bronze onto a foundry floor and then polishing them into the golden shapes that they are now. Helmrich observes that “the darkness and pathos of [Lee’s] early works has perhaps evolved into a sense of light and transcendence. Nevertheless, a deep current underpins the work.” Ultimately, questions of identity and culture have led to a grander vision of existence within her work, evolving from addressing the query of “Who am I?” to the more all-encompassing “What am I?”

This article was published by ArtAsiaPacific: http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/TheDarkOfAbsoluteFreedom

Interview: Carsten Höller

Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller recalibrates the experience of contemporary art by playing with conventional binaries, such as the flimsy line that divides art from entertainment. Lucy Rees speaks with Höller about his installation Golden Mirror Carousel, currently on show at the NVG International. 

Carsten Höller, Golden mirror carousel, 2014. Photograph: Christian Markel. 

Lucy Rees: Drawing on social spaces outside the museum, your work often re-imagines the mental and physical experience of viewing art. Your installation of Golden Mirror Carousel in the Federation Court has been slowed right down to one rotation every few minutes. What are the reasons behind this? 

Carsten Höller: The first carousel I did in 1998 was more of a ready-made where we only changed the motor, slowing it down to the point where it took 12 hours to make a complete rotation. We changed the speed here once it was installed to best suit the space. The mirror reflects the surroundings and the movement means that what is reflected is constantly changing. If you are sitting inside it you see that it is reflecting itself. It’slike a periscope into different viewpoints you wouldn’t normally have access to. The word ‘reflection’ also has a double meaning because it produces a very meditative state.

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2007, installation at Tate Modern, London, between October 2006 and April 9, 2007. 

LR: There seems to be such a heightened expectation for interactivity within the museum today. What is your view of art galleries or museums? What role do they play?  

CH: One of the very reasons I do the carousel is to reflect upon the idea that the museum has become an amusement park. Of course contemporary art is a very sensitive thing. You need to have some kind of loneliness with the artwork. A crucial moment for me was when I visited a Mark Rothko show at the Tate and there were all these people trying to look at it with their audio guides – it’s really not the way art should be seen. But as we know, we are mostly interested in looking at other people. Could you call it a ‘mainstreamisation’?

LR: Does it matter that people with no interest in art might come and ride the carousel purely for the spectacle and might not take anything more away from it?

CH: No, the opposite. The only way to deal with this situation now is to make people see the work with the other people. They become the integral part.

LR: You have a doctorate in agricultural entomology specialising in insects' olfactory communication strategies.  Is there a connection between the way you approach your art and the way you conduct experiments?

 CH: Science is just one attempt to try and explain the world. It’s based on a certain methodology, which has produced some fantastic results, but I’m interested in what could come before science or after science. There is a much larger world out there than one that we can grasp.

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2007, installation at Tate Modern, London, between October 2006 and April 9, 2007. 

LR: A lot of your works are ongoing series, such as the slides you have been installing in museums since 1998. Are your artworks ever finished in the way a scientific experiment produces a definitive result?

 CH: Before it was like the artist had to express some kind of vision or a way of looking at the world. Seeing the world and then expressing this through a painting or some kind of representation. We have done this; it’s time to move on. I don’t think there is this artist’s view of the world anymore.

LR: You are part of a generation of artists born in the 1960s including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to name a a few. Do you associate yourself with a movement?

CH: We are like a movement without wanting to be one. That’s not my term. We have been called the last avant-garde but nolens volens. We are working in such different ways but it’s still somehow the product of a time, you can feel that. The ‘90s was a time when there were more possibilities than now. Not just in art, but in science. An article was recently published called ‘Scientific Genius is Extinct.’ The gaps are being filled and there are no more discoveries to be made – except maybe quantum physics. When was the last time something truly groundbreaking happened?

Carsten Höller, ‘Golden Mirror Carousel,’ National Gallery of Victoria, 10 October 2014 – 1 March 2015.

This article was published by Art & Australia. 

Yin Xiuzhen's Washing River

Leading Chinese contemporary artist Yin Xiuzhen first created the Washing River Project in the mid 1990s in China, a time when performance art was unknown. Shocked to discover the polluted condition of the Funan river in Chendu, Yin assembled 10 cubic metres of frozen contaminated river water and asked people to help wash the blocks of ice. 

In June 2014 Yin was invited to Hobart, Tasmania to create the latest iteration of the project using the water from the nearby Derwent river. Situated on the lip of Sullivan's Cove - an area with high pedestrian activity - the work consists of 162 blocks stacked upon one another. 

Yin Xiuzhen was born during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing and began her career in the early 1990s – a time of radical experimentation. Here she discusses her newest installation in Hobart, her first encounter with ‘performance’ and ‘participatory art’, her interest in second-hand materials, and her position on feminism. 

Lucy Rees: When you did the first project in 1995 in Chengdu, western performance art was little known in China. How did your interest in performance and participatory art begin?

Yin Xiuzhen: Twenty years ago, an American artist got some artists in China to do a water protection project. At the time in Chengdu, the Funan was incredibly polluted. All these new concepts of performance and installation art were totally new to China, and when I started working this way, I had no idea that it was considered ‘performance art’. It was just a very organic development. But it was quite interesting that people started categorising my art as performance. At the time, people’s awareness in China of this concept of environmental protection was new and unfamiliar. I received numerous questions as to why I was doing this project, whereas today it is obviously a much more well-known and important concept.

LR: Tell me about the process behind Washing river, 2014 – collecting the river water, melting it and stacking it.

YX: I started off planning how the wall would look and be built. My team went to collect the water in buckets from upstream, because we couldn’t take it from the harbour considering the extreme saltiness. We worked with the University of Tasmania and the river authorities to analyse and assess the pollution and the heavy-metal levels. We found that the water was extremely polluted, although not quite as bad as the Funan River.

After testing how long it would take for the water to freeze, all 200 containers were collected, then transported to a facility with industrial freezers.

Chainsaws were used to level out each block. Of the 200 blocks produced, only 162 were used in the composition of the wall. My husband Song Dong and I supervised the construction of the wall, which took about two hours.

LR: Washing river joins a long list of your ongoing series including ‘Portable Cities’. Tell me about your interest in continuous work.

YX: My artworks are not simply sculptures; rather they deal with large and ongoing issues such as water pollution, environmental protection, in the case of Washing river, and globalisation and homogenisation.

I think that having an exhibition in one place with a finite end would do a disservice to what I am trying to communicate to the world. And there are many different elements that come into play within the different cities. I have now done Washing river, for example, in four different cities.

LR: You trained in painting and graduated from art school in a very important year in Chinese art history – 1989, when the ‘China/Avant Garde’ exhibition was held at Beijing’s National Art Museum of China. Tell me about the art scene during these early years.

YX: All of my professors were trained in a very specific Soviet style of painting, which they, in turn, taught me. Song Dong and I were actually classmates back in art school, and we both followed our own style and strayed from what was expected from us.

In 1985 there was an American exhibition where I was exposed for the first time to this very new and innovative type of art. At this time I was still under the impression that art was strictly painting or sculpture, or something that simply hangs on a wall. I was suddenly confronted with installations using mundane, everyday objects. It really informed my practice.

When I first started, most of my works appeared underground, because we didn’t have access to exhibition spaces. We would display our works in our homes or friends’ homes. Song Dong did a project called Cultural noodles at home, where he took books and cut them up into strips that resembled actual noodles and then covered the house with them.

LR: Do you feel you were more able to push boundaries and foster creativity because of the cultural conditions of the time?

YX: There was definitely more of a creative community that existed back then. Because it was so underground with no government support, we ended up having to show these works at remote places. We couldn’t legally publicise where these showings were, so we would load up a car with our artwork, ring up our friends and supporters, and hold showings somewhere on the outskirts of town.

LR: The art scene was an overwhelmingly male-dominated realm. To a degree it still is. You were the first Chinese female artist to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, for example. With this in mind, and the fact that you use textiles, threads and domestic objects, you are often grouped as a feminist artist, with contemporaries such as Yin Tianmiao. What is your view on this?

YX: When I graduated there were only four other female artists in my graduating year that I was aware of, because women were still expected to be good wives and mothers without any further pursuit. The concept of feminism is a completely western construct, however, and I do not consider myself a feminist artist. People constantly ask me about my works in regards to their female attributes. It’s the same as people labelling my work ‘performance art’, when I made the works with no real knowledge of the genre. It’s not that I prefer to go by an alternate label; rather I work organically and instinctually and therefore hope to avoid generalisations altogether.

Yin Xiuzhen was born in 1931 in Beijing, China and is represented by Pace New York and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney/Melbourne. 

Interview: Tabaimo

‘MEKURUMEKU’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, presents Japanese artist Tabaimo with six video installations from the early 2000s to the present. During her time in Sydney for the opening, I spoke with the artist about the delicate reality she constructs in her work.

Lucy Rees: A lot of Japanese contemporary art is considered Kawaii or cute. With your blend of surreal happenings that incorporate manga-like drawings and reference Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, your works are far removed from this aesthetic.

Tabaimo: I didn’t think originally about being an artist. I was a graphic designer for many years but it didn’t work for me. I would say that art grabbed me and picked me up and here I am. I really work by how I feel in an intuitive manner. I had no idea that there were even schools of art when I started. 

If you live in Japan, Manga and Anime are all around; it’s ubiquitous but it’s not something that I am necessarily interested in or inspired by. If I draw a line and animate it, it represents something about me – that is what I am more interested in. I am getting input from the world, responding to it, and then internalising it as my expression.

LR: Your animations begin with hundreds of drawings made with a pen or an automatic calligraphy brush. It must be such a laborious process.

T: When I draw a line it is an expression that came from my hand. If I draw a line on a computer it just exists perfectly between these two paints. It’s important that if you draw a line, it’s your line and you take ownership of it. It is indeed laborious; it’s like a Buddhist ritual of observance. It is incredibly disciplined. I don’t know if I like it but I know it needs to be done. I sit down and task myself to do it. Having said that, coming up with the subject is harder.

LR: Your installations are often on a 5-minute loop and there is no single narrative. Do you plan the story before you begin?

T: I don’t start with the finished work in my head. I build on elements as I’m drawing. If an element comes up that I have done before or seen before I am really disappointed. If it turns into something that I could never have imagined in the first place, that is great.

LR: You have created two new installations that respond to the MCA’s architecture, peeling back the walls to reveal the ocean outside. Tell me about the use of artifice, mirrors and optical illusion.

T: I work in fictional spaces, and so mirrors further assist in pushing this dimension. I really want viewers to experience something in my works. We are generally too passive. I want people to stand here and react and feel.

LR: Your videos encompass motifs of femininity such as bodies of water, blooming flowers, petals and hair. What is the role of sexuality in your videos?

T: When I started I really didn’t want to make art that was obviously about gender. I didn’t want to be categorised in this way. Over time, however, I have come to the realisation that you are born with what you have. I was born a woman in Japan. I think it comes out in your work whether you choose it or not. It’s not like I have a particular insight into men; I have insight into being me, so it’s a very internal space that I am revealing. 

LR: The single projection dolefullhouse, 2007, depicts a doll’s house with giant human hands rearranging the contents before a large octopus takes it over and the house is transformed. I read this as East and West, with the octopus as the United States invading Japan.

T: It is welcome that people interpret my work however they like. In my daily life I am not a political being; it’s not actually on my mind when I create things. The octopus is nominally an invader from the outside, but the tentacles become blood vessels, and it’s the moment that transformation occurs that really interests me – an exterior force is internalised.

LR: Sound is a major element in your work, assisting to create a sense of uncertainty or fear, or envelope the viewer in an immersive state of meditation. How important is sound?

T: People don’t often realise that my works are a combined whole – the video and audio are equal elements. Even if I opt to go totally silent and there is no audio in the space, that silence is equally charged. There is the sound of breathing and whistling, and it’s actually me making those noises – something from inside me conveyed to the outside world. It mirrors the very core of my work – the juxtaposition between interior and exterior.

Tabaimo: MEKURUMEKU, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 3 July – 7 September 2014.

This interview was originally published on the Art and Australia website. 

Interview: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Presenting work from 1994 to today, ‘Storytellers of the Town’ at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, is the first Australian solo exhibition of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai artist known here for her contribution to the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. The 4A show is curated by Clare Veal and John Clark, and accompanied by a sister exhibition of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s printmaking at the University of Sydney and a follow-up exhibition at Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery in July.

Lucy Rees: How did you begin to work with video? Your earlier works seen here explore the connection between the living and the dead, between insane and ‘normal’ people, and between humans and animals. Why was video the necessary medium to consider these themes?

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: In 1997 I began to take photos of the corpses but found that it wasn’t enough. I knew that video would solve the problems. For ethical reasons I couldn’t show corpses to audiences directly so I thought that video could be the best way to do it. You can’t take the dead to a public space, but this was a good way to show them to a lot of people.

LR: Was the work originally met with a lot of criticism?

AR: Actually it was more controversial in Thailand than abroad. I had to go through quite difficult procedures to get access to the bodies in the first place. In Thailand they just think about ethics. That’s the difference for the viewer: they need to step across the line and consume the work as art, not under the strong conditions of Thai culture. 

LR: Can you comment on your interest in death?

AR: I think making art is confronting my fear. It’s the unknown. I try to get closer and closer to it, each time challenging myself. I want to look in detail at the relationship to death through song and art.

I once had a solo show in Sweden and a professor of philosophy came up to me afterwards and said ‘Thank you. We had never had the chance to look at dead bodies’. And during my show the prime minister of Sweden was shot. Many people then came to see the show to try to make sense of what had happened. Something strange occurred – art begins and life continues, but at some point they cross over in the middle.

LR: Tell me about the powerful multichannel video work The insane, 2002.

AR: It took me about two years to get the permission to film these women in a mental asylum. They were not allowed to speak to the public so I wanted to tell their stories. Finally, I simply put the camera in front of these women and let them speak as they wished. Some laughed, some cried. And there were so many different voices. Some were slow, some were loud, some were nervous.

LR: You write extensively for magazines and have written a number of books. Does writing inform your artmaking practice?

AR: When I was young I used to write about lovers and it was all about romance. During my stay and study in Germany over twenty years ago, my printmaking brought up many questions about women. I wrote a book at this time about the positioning of Thai women in Germany, and it was the first time I could get close to women like this, who in the past worked as prostitutes and then got married to German men. In Thailand I worked as a university lecturer, but I learnt so much from these women playing cards and chatting. I then made a series of works about these women that were shown at the National Gallery of Thailand in Bangkok in 1995. 

LR: Your work comments on the role of women in Thailand. Could you be labelled a feminist? 

AR: I think that my position as a feminist artist is problematic because there is a strand of feminist art discourse in Thailand and groups of female artists that exhibit together as feminist artists. I have never taken part in these. In lots of my works I see the position of women as one of strength; compassion for dogs or being able to connect with the women in the asylum is actually empowering and comes from being a women. That said the women in the asylum were often traumatised by abuse from men. So I experience the world as a woman but I am aware of the inequalities.

LR: Do you consider yourself part of an art movement? Who are your peers?

AR: I am alone; I work alone. The filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a friend of mine. Our work is not similar at all, but he is similar in that he does not succumb to ‘Thai-ness’ or a prettified idea of what art should look like.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 14 March – 10 May 2014; Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 4 July – 10 August 2014.

Interview: Omar Chowdhury

Australian-Bangladeshi artist Omar Chowdhury’s first solo exhibition ‘Ways’ is currently on at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Based in Sydney and Dhaka, the artist produces large-scale, richly detailed audio-visual installations.

Lucy Rees: You have been living in Dhaka, Bangladesh for the past two years working on these four new works. Tell me about your experience there.

Omar Chowdhury: I moved to one of the harshest and densest countries on earth. It is so intense on every front. The food, sanitation and pollution are bad.  There is a lot of complexity too – the economy is growing by 6% every year and it has been for the last ten or fifteen years. It’s also at the juncture of tectonic plates between modernity and tradition. The edges aren’t cleanly cut. Past and future are mixed up and they react to each other. It’s a really alive environment. 

LR: Locus I and II document rituals undertaken by attendees in a Hindu temple and Isamlic Mosque in the ancient city of Old Dhaka. They run for 146 minutes and 74 minutes respectively. Torsions is filmed at a  Hindu Festival and Shia Muslim Festival and runs at 106 minutes. All up this show incorporates 7 hours of video…

OC: I literally film hundreds of hours. 7 hours was cut from 120-130 hours of footage. I never know how long these works will be, that would defeat the purpose. What is crucial to the process is that I want to be reacting to the world. I feel I am constantly pulled in so many different directions and I get lost. My camera is more stable than I am. It doesn’t have consciousness like I do. I can point it and use it, and then have a look at what it sees, and see the world as something more still. I realised I could do things with the world if I wanted, which is the whole impetus behind why we make art.

LR: You maintain an interesting balance between a documentary and a creative whimsical approach.

OC: There are many fictional elements throughout where I interject and change what is going on in front of me. In Vastness In Eclipse, for example, the tea plantation worker is walking in front of an elephant that doesn’t exist. The back channel of this work is also interesting, which reveals a colleague and I editing another version of the film that was never made. Sometimes I actually walk into the shots but most viewers don’t notice. Along with artifice, other important elements are the rhythm, music and flow. I want the viewers to be able to let themselves go – their desires, wants and identities – and to become lost in the action. It is in this state that you can really learn to exist in the world. 

LR: Are your works art or film?

OC: They are installations. I am very interested in spatiality – how these objects exist in space and how they make us feel. Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an important influence for me as he represents the duality between art and film.

LR: Your works have a beautiful, painterly quality. Are you afraid of exoticising?

OC: I don’t think we should throw away beauty; Arte Povera taught us a lot about finding beauty in the ugly. Exoticising is a big concern of mine though. At one point I film a man who is involved in a process of self-flagellation, his back is bloodied completely. Afterwards I shoot him on his mobile phone as he scrolls down, as though using Facebook. I use techniques to say to the audience ‘you don’t know this. This is a real place with real people and there is modernity here too’.

LR: What are you working on next?

I have a trip around Australia planned. I am doing exposure paintings – canvases that are exposed to things like smoke, like the way film is exposed to light. I am going to be working with the early Australian bush paintings and will make a video work of the forest towns.  Following that I have a residency and solo show at MOMENTUM, Berlin during Berlin Art Week. Then I return to Bangladesh where I will be starting on two very large new projects. 

Omar Chowdhury: Ways, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 30 May - 2 August 2014. 

This interview was first published on the ARTAND Australia website. 

Interview: with Isaac Julien

Part documentary and part fiction, Isaac Julien’s PLAYTIME, 2013, is set across Reykjavik, Dubai and London – three cities, defined by their role in relation to capital – and follows six main protagonists – the artist, hedge fund manager, auctioneer, housekeeper, art dealer and reporter and their entanglement with the global financial crisis. The exhibition - which comprises of the large film installation, PLAYTIME, a two-monitor flat-screen installation, KAPITAL, and six photographic works - was shown at Metro Pictures gallery in New York in late 2013. KAPITAL presents Julien and David Harvey, author of the book “The Enigma of Capital,” in conversation with theorists, critics and curators at the Hayward Gallery in London.  

I caught up with Isaac Julien while he was in Sydney with an exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (15 March – 12 April 2014). 

Lucy Rees: You’ve said that PLAYTIME was influenced by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, but the themes have been in your work all along. How did PLAYTIME begin?

Isaac Julien: During the making of Ten thousand waves, 2010, I began to want to make a film called PLAYTIME. I was really struck by the 2008 crash. After I saw Jacque Tati’s film Playtime(1967), a hilarious comedy of manners, I wanted to make a piece of work that was an ironic reflection; something that might be quite sardonic in terms of its visual presentation. I wanted to make a work that was looking into the mirror, pointing the camera at myself and at the art world in which I exist.

LR: Tell me about your personal relationship to the film’s three stories.

IJ: I think it’s important to say that a lot of my works begin through a personal relation. PLAYTIME starts its story with the Icelandic photographer Thorsten Henn, who lost his modernist dream home during the crash in 2008 as the bank withdrew its funds and the country falls into financial ruin. It’s about the experience of trauma he underwent. The modern ruin couldn’t be finished – it needed a memorialisation. Memorialisation has been a theme in my work.

Dubai came about through my housekeeper. She was from Dubai and came to work for me in London. She wanted to escape her Dubai employers. What’s interesting about her story is the way that capital is vulnerable and unstable – insecure. It makes people disposable; people need to be able to move from space to space, which is important for capital to work. I wanted to juxtapose that with her story.

LR: Has your own view of the art world changed during the research and making of PLAYTIME?

IJ: I don’t think I participate in the art world uncritically. I came from film via art school at Central Saint Martins, London, and then decided to make video works. The thing about video art is that the very medium is quite excluded from the secondary market, which I think allows for further reflection.

LR: Was a lot of the film completed in post-production?

IJ: Yes, there are a lot of special effects. For example, the computer terminals that appear in the scene when the bankers are looking down are all CGI.

LR: There is an interesting link to the very concept of capital there. David Harvey says that capital cannot be seen but only detected through its effect, something that is in constant motion.

IJ: This is important. And that’s why there is a lot of talking in the film. Visualisation is not enough. It’s shot on super high definition and it’s the first work I have made that is not on actual film; it is just a digital code. There’s definitely a metaphor there. We know the scenes must have taken place for the camera to have recorded them, but they don’t really exist. It is non-material and only gets activated through projections. The technology actually mirrors the enigmatic nature of capital. It’s like in banking: millions of dollars can be made and lost in milliseconds, all through computer programming. These are the invisible forces that are literally controlling our lives.

This interview was first published on Art and Australia's website. 

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Isaac Julien has had one-person exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; St. Louis Art Museum; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo; and Aspen Art Museum. Julien participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, 8th Shanghai Biennale; and 2012’s La Triennale at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. His films have been included in film festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Biennale and Venice Film Festival.

Interview: Gabriella and Silvana Mangano: Of Objects or Sound

'Of Objects or Sound’ is currently on at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition consists of new video works documenting object and sound-based performances by Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano created during a residency in New York. 

Lucy Rees: What did the residency entail?  

Silvana Mangano: The first three months of the residency was organised through the Australia Arts Council. That was purely for research and to attend Performa 13.

Gabriella Mangano: We then did a residency from December 2013 – February 2014 at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) funded through Dame Joan Sutherland.

LR: The videos depict you performing with forgotten and thrown away sheets, rods, wheels and balls that you found scouring the streets of New York. Tell me about this process and the notion of the readymade. 

GM: Our ISCP studio was based in a very industrial zone in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn and we started collecting these beautiful objects being dumped on rubbish night. It was winter in New York and the ground was covered in white snow, it was as though these discarded objects were already on plinths.

SM: Once the pieces were inside our studio we felt like we truly existed in the city, and we had a valid connection. We owned the time and place of the objects. We could then direct them, or they could direct us.  When you’re travelling you are always looking at things from a distance that you can never really touch.

We took their previous histories and re-invented their energies. Interestingly, the objects also mostly came from something that was moving prior, like a car or a machine. The red tube inPerformance Compositions for Sculpture (8) actually smelt a lot like petrol as it came from inside a car. It was originally a long piece of tubing, but we connected it to make it more sculptural. We felt that it encapsulated the movement of a car that is constantly going from A to B.

LR: You took part in the Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2013. How did this experience inform your practice? 

GM: Russian Constructivism has always really inspired us. To have the opportunity to be in Russia and see works by these artists in the flesh made our art practice suddenly make sense.Performance Compositions for Sculpture (5) is a gold metal rod that reminded us of the sculptures we saw in Russia. 

SM: The architecture was so sculptural and had such strong forms. There was a sensibility in the city that really spoke to us.

LR: The sound element of the videos is very melodic and there is a sense of timelessness. Are we supposed to be aware of the time passing, or lost in it?

SM:  The soundtrack is recorded at 60 beats per minute. We wanted to create performances within that tempo because we found that while we were collecting objects there was a real slowing down. The videos are about 5 minutes long and are cyclic so you're not sure if you're in the past, present or future. 

LR: How much work goes into editing and stripping back your performances afterwards?

SM: It’s a really long textural process. To even get to the actual editing process takes time. We want to get the very essence by isolating and abstracting time and movement. 

LR: When the performances end do the objects hold any meaning? Did you bring them back to Sydney? 

SM: After every performance it's a habit of ours to house all the objects. We are interested to preserve the traces of what has been done to them. 

GM: We did some huge paper sculptures for the Biennale of Sydney and once they were used, they were all torn and so beautiful. We have always thought we’d like to have an exhibition of all the leftovers. 

This interview was first published on ARTAND Australia's website.

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Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano studied drawing separately at the Victorian College of the Arts, only later did they come together to collaborate on the videos Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano studied drawing separately at the Victorian College of the Arts, only later did they come together to collaborate on the videos for which they are now well-known. 

Selected solo shows inciude: Gabriella and Silvana Mangano’, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2009; ‘Between Near and Far’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney, 2009; ‘If…so…then…’, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, 2008; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2007.

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before & After Science’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2010; ‘I Walk the Line: New Australian Drawing’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009; ‘The New Fresh Cut’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008; ‘The Wandering Line: Thinking Through Drawing’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008.

The artists are represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney and Melbourne. Read more about their works here.