Sorcha Dallas

In 1973 in some town in the US, blood is leaking underneath a door of a house onto the pavement. Pedestrians pass by, astonished and disgusted, unable to relate to this disturbing moment breaking into their flaneurish routine. The scene was staged by Ana Mendieta. Strangely this image of anonymous violence turns into an absurd scenery. It provides a platform for the passers-by, their different looks and social profiles, their spontaneous performances, half intimate half public.

Apart from the obvious political background of Mendieta’s performance pointing to the limited capability of the public to react on domestic violence, the piece also seems to unfold a more abstract moment of a standstill. The puddle of blood becomes a silent sensation, a disruption of the flow of the everyday and the unifying effects of late capitalist culture.

Looking for self-realisation in this stage of urban milieus deprives us more and more from a sense of social gathering as a satisfying ideal, something meaningful, a disruption through enjoyment, love, sex, care, change and in its most radical vision death.

One remembers the special excitement of getting dressed up, for a night, a special event of significance, which is intended to create a change of intensity, a time out of the logic of rational pressures and constraints. Dressing up marks a moment of increased fragility, of exposure which can fail and even provoke aggression. It can be a protecting new skin, an armour, a pathetic and hysterical recreation of the self.

An extravaganza of this kind seems to be pretty obsolete in a pragmatic culture of today driven by the logic of efficiency, pragmatism and the cult of the casual. But one might look at it anew, as an elegiac posture, as transformative as distancing, pointing to a lack, to what one might miss, an introduction to an alternative realm of expression.

Seth Price’s Vintage Bomber (2006) is the last one in a series of this iconic object casted in polystyrene. The bomber jacket is associated with youth culture and street fashion. It’s an anonymous but glamorous subsitute or code for a person identifying with a specific scene of environment. It also reminds one a lot of the hysterical poses of Robert Longo’s ‘Men of the City’ in the 80s or his casts of bunches of people composed as whirling chaotic pool of bodies, a modern Raft of the Medusa, maybe after a stock market crash.

Michael Hakimi created an installation consisting of three elements in the first room: a large inkjet print titled World on Wire, next to a column made of British newspapers sticking in the corner of the gallery and marked with a black line of spray paint. Another element is a small negative print of a shop receipt on black paper with the numbers arranged like a face. World on Wire shows a computer composition with rough pixellation used as an aesthetic element of building a strangely abstracted image of a ruin with satellite dished attached to it. A lot of this imagery in Hakimi’s work comes from travels and an intense new relationship with his former home country Iran. The Coordinates installation of newspaper and spray line refers again to a street oriented scenario of billboards, public announcements or temporary aesthetic of construction sites. These elements are abstracted reminders of an intensified perception of the spatial environments of the urban sphere.

Edwin La Liq’s Lads look like visionary fashion drawings, fantasy styles and proposals for a dressing in the streets of London with no destination in sight which would really suit them. The Lads wear eccentric accessories indicating their radical contemporariness. They often look quite effeminate, with their sexual identity being quite ambivalent and beautifully unstable.

Nick Mauss’s drawings are composed of delicate designs and evocative fragments of figuration Xeroxed into the sketchy ephemeral works. There are special signifiers built into them like the portrait of AnnMarie Schwarzenbach, a remarkable novelist and photographer based in the 30s in Berlin who wrote about queer identity very much avant la letter. Her writings and photographs documented travels in the Middle East and Central Asia, the rise of Fascism in Europe, and the state of racism and labour relations in the USA.

Agnieszka Brezezanska works on different levels with painting, photography and film. All three sides of her work are presented in the show. Her Short Movies are very much about the idea of a scene not going out and gathering instead in the private sphere. The films show her and other artists around her in Warsaw acting out and mocking the grotesque moments of the everyday experience in the middle of a rigid political climate of the new Right in Poland. Her movies have a strong reflex to this external situation as they have this amateurish almost nostalgic charm reminiscent of an alternative culture in the communist time. Her photograph Race of Ladies belongs to the same spectrum showing a young woman experimenting with a big ball under her fancy dress in an apartment, a borderline image of eccentric posing, with the woman confrontationally looking at the spectator.

Ryan Doolan’s sculptural installation Rational Gayz consists of three parts: the unfilled clay head of Bertrand Russell is gazing at a group of six miniature figures lined up on the floor showing a special spectrum of society in characteristic poses, the Pope, hooligans, aristocrats and people from the media world. A glass plate attached next to the clay bust has the writing ‘Gayz’ on it. It’s the consoling gaze of the dandy philosopher which determines the perspective on this parade of the multiprojected and therefore unstable identities.

Friederike Clever’s painting Untitled is in part a collaged silhouette of, probably, a female figure against a background of decorative expressive brownish patterns. The figure appears cryptic and self-contained. It stays pretty much underdefined, refuses explanation, but it has an enigmatic aura of its own. The body of the figure is covered with another pattern as if there is an imaginary continuity of the external world the figure is standing in and its own phantasmatic identity. Thinking back of an Ana Mendieta’s continuous Silueta series from the 70s and early 80s of imprints of her body on soil in different locations in the worlds, and not to forget her final dramatic death falling out of the window of her apartment in Manhattan, Clever’s contemporary painting of the enigmatic and grotesque silhouette opens a surprising spectrum of aesthetic association in the show.