Exhibition
Gathering Pace
9 Nov 2016 – 31 Jan 2017
Event times
Wednesday to Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- 2 Clunbury Str
- N1 6TT
- London
- N1 6TT
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Buses 141, 21, 271, 76 and N76 stop in New North Rd (Mintern Str) and 394 directly by the gallery.
- Tube Old Street or Hoxton
- Old Street / Hoxton
waterside contemporary is pleased to present Gathering Pace, with Nicoline van Harskamp and Marianna Christofides.
About
Nicoline van Harskamp uses varieties of internationally-spoken English to propose a future shaped by the ubiquity and constant evolution of the language, and its inevitable divergence from hegemonic norms. Portrait of an Englishes Collector sees a fictional amateur linguist conduct a methodical, though scientifically frivolous study of the lingua franca spoken in remote parts of the world. Through a series of fractured phone conversations, he uses the International Phonetic Alphabet to collect fragments of pronunciation and language use.
Devised with actors, students, and sometimes linguist, van Harskamp’s performative actions, plays, documents and video works bring out the correspondence between content and the aesthetic framework in which it comes into force.
Marianna Christofides' Perennial Limbo is a portrait of the artist’s late father, consisting of some 400 cardboard sheets cut out by hand and held together with metal clamps. Each piece contains a manuscript fragment transferred from the subject’s diaries – here obscured and inaccessible lest the representation be disassembled.
Part of the cardboard head appears to be missing – repurposed by the artist in another work, where it serves as a topographical feature.
Working primarily in installation, film and text, Christofides studies the multiplicity of images that form consensus and collective memories, treating each as an imaginary document. Her collection of moments, objects, places and physical experiences – sometimes brought into gallery spaces wholesale, sometimes represented in poetic imagery - creates an illusion of traveling through a familiar yet fictitious world. Events can unravel at geological speeds, and whole lifetimes appear in singular objects.