Beatrice Gibson: Crone Music

About

Borrowing its title from American composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1990 album of the same name, the exhibition seeks out an explicitly feminist lineage through which to recast the syncretic, collective and participatory nature of Gibson’s practice.

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead was filmed in part with CAConrad and Eileen Myles, two of the USA’s most significant living poets, on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in January 2017. Weaving together CAConrad and Myles’ words with those of other poets, footage shot through the following year in America and Europe, and intimate moments with her family, the film is a deeply personal work in which Gibson seeks out the power of ritual, casting the poet as a prophet navigating an alternative path in times of perilous authority.

Made as a companion piece, the second film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (Two Sisters who aren't Sisters) is based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

Alongside the films, Gallery 3 will host an expanded programme of readings, screenings, performances, talks, workshops, meetings and residencies led by the films’ collaborators. Rooted in feminist and queer discourse, these will include a Radical Reading Sit-In with Eileen Myles; one-to-one Personalized (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals with CAConrad; a special performance by Thurston Moore and a week of experimental music composition and concerts with Laurence Crane, drawing on the work of Pauline Oliveros. Also presented is a screening programme curated by Gibson of moving image works by filmmakers and friends from whom Gibson has drawn inspiration, including Basma Alsharif, Mary Helena Clark, Ana Vaz, Mati Diop, Laida Lertxundi, Barbara Hammer, Chantal Akerman, Chick Strand, Public Access Poetry, Kenneth Anger, Leslie Thornton, and others.

Working at the intersection of art, feminism, expanded cinema, experimental literature and film, Crone Music explores friendship, feeling, empathy and solidarity as tools for individual and collective agency in an ever more unsettled world.