Tai Shani & A- – -Z (Anne Duffau) present an evening of performances and screenings around Sci Fi / gender / technology / the contemporary gothic at Dilston Grove. Dark Water explores and extends the duo’s ongoing research into notions of a morphic body through technology and the concept of inner space, presenting work by artists including:
Dara Birnbaum
Brice Dellsperger
Plastique Fantastique
The Man Who Has Failed
Shana Moulton
Takeshi Murata
Fani Parali
Tai Shani
“At the point of ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ or maximum Entropy / A realised cyborgian myth / A Subliminal intervention between Here and Nowhere” (Tai Shani, The Vampyre, 2016)
£5 early bird tickets available now
Please note that seated places will be limited so arrive early – a 15 min interval will take place after the first hour.
Evening schedule:
– Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978.79, 5.50min
– Brice Dellsperger, Body Double 30, 2min53 2013 – courtesy Air de Paris (Paris) & Team Gallery (New York)
– Plastique Fantastique performance, 20 min
– The Man Who Has Failed, Pearl Hotel Spiral, 2016, 10.42min
– Takeshi Murata, OM Rider, 2013, 11.39min
– Shana Moulton, The Undiscovered Drawer, 2013, 9.29min
– Fani Parali – Let them in, 20min, 2016
– Tai Shani – Dark Continent: Mnemesoid, performed by Gemma Brockis, 2016, 25/30min
Artist information
Dara Birnbaum‘s provocative video works are among the most influential and innovative contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and television. International solo exhibitions of her work include The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Wilkinson Gallery, London; IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia; and the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal. Retrospective screenings include The American Film Institute, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus, Zurich; and Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland. Birnbaum was the only video artist invited to participate in Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; the 1985 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; and the 74th American Exhibition, Chicago, where she was awarded the Norman Wait Harris Prize.
In 2009 Birnbaum was honored with a major retrospective of her work, entitled The Dark Matter of Media Light, at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, Belgium. The exhibition traveled to the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal, in 2010. A major catalogue of the same name was published in 2011.
For the past two decades, Brice Dellsperger has developed a vast, nearly overwhelming body of work, titled Body Double after Brian De Palma’s psycho-sexual thriller of the same name. The oeuvre consists of thirty video works, investigations into the conceptual, social and formal tropes that inform cinema and spectatorship. Both reverent and destructive towards his source material, the artist’s practice voraciously cannibalizes and digests iconic moments in film. The resultant works are arresting, both viscerally affecting and deeply cerebral, heavily informed by film and queer theory. Brice Dellsperger has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including Kunstbunker, Nurnberg, Germany; The Akbank Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey; Midway Contemporary Art, St. Paul, Minnesota; and Le Consortium, Dijon, France. He will mount an exhibition along with Jean-Luc Verna, at FRAC Alsace, France, in June of 2011. His work is represented in numerous public collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art here in New York.
Plastique Fantastique is a group that investigates aesthetics, the sacred, politics and both popular and mass culture through comics, performances, texts, assemblages and installations. It is envisaged as a group of human and inhuman avatars delivering communiqués from the extreme past and the future. Its works are baroque and transformative, they express a subversive urgency and are frequently site-specific.
The Man Who Has Failed
Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Shana Moulton was born in 1976. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton has also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her video work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at Art in General, New York, Migros Museum, Zurich; Contemporary Museum of Art, Uppsala; Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris; Aurora, Edinburgh; Dark Light Festival, Dublin; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen; Broadway 1602, New York; and Gimpel Fils, London. Moulton’s performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen, New York; PERFORMA 09, New York; Aurora Picture Show, Houston; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; among others.
Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that refigure the experience of animation. Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. Murata has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.
Fani Parali was born in Greece and is currently living and working in London. Parali’s practice includes working with sculptural objects, moving image, text, sound and performance, through directing and collaborating with other people. She holds a BA Sculpture degree from Camberwell College of Arts and is now studying at the Postgraduate Fine Art course at the Royal Academy Schools. Recent shows include All About My Mother, the Keeper’s Studio, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Premiums: Interim Projects 2016, Royal Academy of Arts, London, I never lied to you, Camberwell Space, London, P, Horatio Jr, London, Walking through fiction, Camberwell Space, London, A Union of Voices, Horatio Jr, London , A Cool Drink to Cheek, Plazaplaza, London.
Tai Shani‘s multidisciplinary practice revolves around experimental narrative texts, which alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect in relation to post-patriarchal realism. Shani’s on-going project, Dark Continent Productions, includes films and performances, forming a mythology that conceptualises the ‘epic’ to test the potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to imagine a post-patriarchal world. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011).
A- – -Z is an exploratory curatorial platform produced by Anne Duffau. Taking the formula of the alphabet, A- – -Z uses words related to the idea of Entropy as a starting point to map out and test various unstable potentials. one Letter, one experiment, twenty six times.
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