Artists' Books

Presented as the blueprints for three public lectures, We are behind proposes alternative routes through Emily Wardill’s work and represents three different attempts at embodying and dissembling knowledge. Using different formal textual devices, from which they also deviate – a standard lecture, the subject of which becomes something felt, not taught; an a-chronological conversation; and the transcript of a play rendered as a formal essay – each section describes the different facets of an ongoing dialogue between the authors. Fragmented not only by dialogic turns, appropriated texts, images, a score and quotations, and containing extensive reproductions of Wardill’s work, the book’s content and design reflects the labyrinthine, and sometimes hallucinogenic quality of her films and their radical combination of form, content and idea.

Each section focuses on specific works. Section One, The Object, uses The Diamond (Descartes Daughter), SEA OAK, and Gamekeepers without Game, to explore ideas of the rational, public art, the public, linguistic framing and the irrational, via Gladys Knight and the Pips, a hand-drawn hallucinogenic section, Seth Price’s essay Dispersion, Norman Mailer, The Rockridge Institute and Peter Gidal. Section Two, The Window follows a conversations between the authors, that opens onto desire, politics, mirrors, and the films Basking in what feels like ‘An Ocean of Grace’ I soon realise that I am not looking at it but rather, I AM it, recognising myself, Split the View in Two (Part Two), and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck. In the final part, The Theatre, an apparently formal essay on the implications of framing live action, the proscenium arch as a link between theatre and cinema, Dan Graham, perspective, power and its collapse, transforms into a collection of dialogues around Ben, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, authenticity, reality and fiction.

Skinned and Detouched, a pair of artists books, are a portal to a single performative stage in the industrial production of two large scale sculptures, one of which is on show at Large Glass. The books, including writing by Jennifer Boyd, photography by Thierry Bal and design by Europa, imaginatively document the multiple embodiments and disembodiments involved in one moment in the production of the two works.

TEXTS BY MARLIE MUL, LINDA STUPART AND GEORGIA HORGAN. DESIGN BY MAXIMAGE.

Sleep is the lover I fear is a translation of the work Das ›Nein‹ scheint für den Traum nicht zu existieren into the 2-dimensional space of printing in the format of a typographic score, taking shape as a long folded leporello,. The work is a close observation of the visual and sonic qualities a text can have by itself. Through arrainging text fragments from Freud’s Traumdeutung as well as feminist science-fiction I create an onomatopoetic language-landscape, that explres ideas around physicality, sleep, dreams and desire.

In Que Faire? a group of local amateur actors focuses on the exchangeable power of spoken word and its transformative nature. The group searches desperately for ideas, they look for a way to save their jobs through the use of language. They go to group therapy, they lock themselves in the writer’s room and they live their collective unemployment in an empty studio of the former Company. In QueFaire? the power of the collective works as a lonely psycothic voice. The city of Noisy-le-Sec where I have lived for 7 months becomes the ground of this fiction and integrates the inhabitants as actors, the activity and the municipal places of the city, gathering and re-inventing the notions of inspiration and creativity at work.

Authors and contributors: Liv Schulman, in collaboration with Alain Farrès, Dominique Martin, Thomas Brehamet-Godet, Gaëtan Alepee, Nathanaëlle Puaud, Emilie Renard, Zoe Charles, Alban Legass, Régine Besenval, Nadège Souillard et Marjolaine Calipel.

Text in French.
Graphic Design: Roxanne Maillet

Artist edition for Francesca, a performance by Nathalie Rozanes.