ROSA BARBA JEREMIAH DAY LONNIE VAN BRUMMELEN & SIEBREN DE HAAN AND AURELIEN FROMENT

Rosa Barba, Jeremiah Day, Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, and Aurélien Froment

Stimulated by the Irish political, economic and social context, or by the possibilities of production within the multi-disciplinary nature of Project Arts Centre, Rosa Barba, Jeremiah Day, Lonnie van Brummelen & Seibren de Haan and Aurélien Froment will embark on a process of production with Project in 2007 culminating in the presentation of a new work. Each of the processes, which will be punctuated as well as concluded with a publication, has begun in this exhibition which operates as an introduction. Each artist is presenting a work which is exemplary of their oeuvre, providing a context for later discussion and an opportunity to get to know one another a little better.

Rosa Barba
The 16mm projection installation It’s gonna happen, 2005 is indicative of the preoccupation with narrative which will become the basis of Barba’s future collaboration with Project. Functioning as a continuous loop, It’s gonna happen provides an intimate portal into a world of possible espionage, probable subterfuge surveillance and knowledge predicated on overheard stories or whispered myths. The analogue relationship between image and sound – the dual components of a filmic experience – is systematically inverted, with the relationship of what we are hearing to what we are seeing, emerging slowly on our consciousness. The constructed nature of scripted film, as well as in broader types of narrative, is laid bare, but at the same time a re-performance of its own form. The flashing text segments are re-worked to take the form of an old, almost melted celluloid quality.For an exhibition in Berlin in 2006, Barba collaborated against Croatian artist David Maljkovic, where their works both relied on and fought against each other. Working within the context of a theatre environment at Project, Rosa Barba has invited David Maljkovic to collaborate with her in a dual project investigating and rebutting their completely different approaches to narrative and story-telling.

Jeremiah Day
In the series of photographic works Thirty Three Man Made Objects, Jeremiah Day combines open-ended images with documentary ones and theoretical questions with personal ones in order to establish a fractured space of meditation on politics and memory. The anchor for this line of thought is documentation of the reconstruction work on the major monuments and memorials in Washington DC that took place over the summer of 2004. Such a physical re-working of the country’s symbols would be provocative by itself, but seen in the light of the recent dislocations and reorientation that have changed the nature of political life in the US, the closure of the Washington Monument seemed almost epic in significance. Day juxtaposes these stories with other reflections on history, and images capturing a ephemeral glimpses of shifting time.

US President John Quincy Adams once commented that “democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medallions. It does not bear the head of a man on its coins. Its true essence is iconoclasm.” Which of course begs the question of how one could represent politics in a way consist with self government, in which each of us are supposed to have our share of the public thing, the res publica. The ambition of building up such a way of representing lived politics is the red line through Day’s work, which brings images and text together into oblique narratives. The work he will develop for Project will include a presentation of the work of Simone Forti, an underground legend of avant-garde dance, who has similarly strived to engage political reality through experimental methods with text, memory, image and story-telling. Aware of the socio-political context of Irish activism and resistance, Day and Forti will obliquely engage with the difficult idea of site-specificity, by association.

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan
Van Brummelen & de Haan will present the 35mm triptych Grossraum and The Formal Trajectory, one of their earliest research projects in which they collaborated and an important founding chapter in their on-going journey. With the emergence of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland has seen rapid capitalist economic expansion, contributing towards inevitable cultural self-interrogation and a heightened awareness of global identities and economies. Within this context of rapid development and expansion, keeping in mind Ireland’s relationship to the EU, in 2007 Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan have been invited to continue their research and produce a new work for Project.

Grossraum is a 35mm film, shot at the location of three of the borders of Europe – Hrebenne, the border between Poland and Ukraine; Ceuta, the border between Spain and Morocco; and Lefkosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. The landscapes, largely unprepared for their status and capacity as official control nodes, meander over traffic-jammed deadlocks, illegal trade and make-shift border structures. The Formal Trajectory tracks the process surrounding the production of Grossraum, including embassy and border patrol correspondence, explaining their intentions and telling stories about the bureaucratic realities which make these abstract borders become frustratingly concrete.

Aurélien Froment
The Apse, The Bell and The Antelope is a film shot on location in Arcosanti, Arizona, the architectural project of Paolo Soleri, through which we are guided by the film’s protagonist, Roger Tomalty. This film, together with A Hole in the Shelf, 2006 – nine books out of ten borrowed from the Arcosanti library, will introduce Irish audiences to the practice of an artist who both uses and quotes the medium of film, re-inventing and challenging conventional understandings of narrative, authenticity, and what one might think of as the edges of comprehension – the meaning of which you might only glimpse out of the corner of your eye. Using an interwoven pattern of layered signifiers and references, Aurélien Froment encourages a suspension of disbelief, an abandonment of reason, and to focus on the cracks between scenes, the air between books, where the space between things is just as important as the objects themselves. The inherent theatricality in his approach will eventually turn a site of theatre into a site of production. Froment plans to build and shoot a new film in Project Arts Centre, which embarks on a journey with one of France’s most intriguing illusionists.

Four New Artists Invitation