Friday, May 27, 2011

MATHIEU COPELAND, 'STUDIES FOR AN EXHIBITION' AT DAVID ROBERTS ART FOUNDATION, LONDON



Recreation of Gustav Metzger’s 1956 exhibition/display covering the windows of 30Queens, Kings Lynn, with posters he collected of the exhibition This is Tomorrow shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956/2011. Courtesy of the artist. With thanks to Tate Archive and Adrian Glew.


exhibition view




Elena Bajo, Illusion, Delusion, Allusion: The Order of Anarchy (Studies for a Movement at 66 r.p.m), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and D+T Project, Brussels.


Niele Toroni, Quand les empreintes de pinceau n°50 s’affichent sur leurs affiches – Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Pietro Sparta, Chagny.


An Exhibition to Hear Read/Une Exposition à être lue, Volume 3. Daily readings at 2pm.


exhibition view with reading plattform





Karin Sander, Mailed Paintings, 2004 - 2011. Courtesy of the artist.


Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical, 2011. Courtesy of the artists. Booklets available at the front desk.




Study for an exhibition of violence in contemporary art, Institute of Contemporary Art’, February-March 1964.


Emma Bjornesparr, The Commercial Waste Collection, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.


curators’ series # 4
Studies for an Exhibition
07.04.2011 -11.06.2011.

With Elena Bajo, Robert Barry, Emma Bjornesparr, Jarrod Fowler, Nicolas Garait, Karl Holmqvist, Bethan Huws, David Medalla, Gustav Metzger, Roman Opalka, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Karin Sander, Yann Sérandour, Cally Spooner, Sue Tompkins, and Niele Toroni.

an exhibition by Mathieu Copeland.

Mathieu Copeland is the fourth guest curator invited by The David Roberts Art Foundation to be part of the Curators’ Series. Studies for an Exhibition, explores how exhibitions are to be envisaged in regard to transient thoughts – an art that reveals itself through time, as movements of transitions, as possible studies giving the feeling of what is, and what can be.

Following a desire to not fix in form an exhibition to be, Studies for an Exhibition brings together practices that explore the possibilities of immateriality and the temporal nature of an art object. The question of time and accumulation is adamant to an exhibition that considers a recycling of our current reality as the means to generate transitory new forms.

Moments of history are revisited, as with the recreation of Gustav Metzger’s 1956 display/appropriation of the posters advertising the seminal show at the Whitechapel Gallery This Is Tomorrow, which he used to cover the entire shop windows of his then second hand shop/exhibition space 30Queens in Kings Lynn. A means to advertise what was tomorrow then, the posters can be read in parallel to the altered exhibition posters by Niele Toroni, who painted over posters advertising his own exhibitions, thereby blurring the moment of the original shows and when these are painted, and shown. Past realities are again revisited and appropriated when confronted with the entire ‘bootleg’ of a 1964 ICA exhibition entitled Study for an exhibition of violence in contemporary art.

In relation to these works of past and present readings, the ‘mailed paintings’ by Karin Sander create in the space of the gallery an unstable hanging as these are being mailed back and forth to the artist in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition. The paintings capture their own reality by acquiring marks as they travel unprotected from one place to the next. As an echo to this reality in motion for an exhibition to be, Emma Bjornesparr addresses the location of the gallery and the habits of consumption. Through a temporary sculpture that frames the entire time of an exhibition in saving the accumulated waste, the artist creates the inversed portrait of the host institution.

Since 1972 Roman Opalka marks time through the progressive inscription of numbers painted from one to infinity. The constant evolution of these paintings is accompanied by a tape recording of his own voice saying the numbers out loud as he writes them. By disseminating these recordings in the space of the gallery we are projected into an ephemeral experience of time.

Accumulation of knowledge is the focus of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’ work. Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical is an archive based on their ongoing research into plants from the neotropical region. As part of this continuous study, a series of booklets will be handed out. Elena Bajo’s commission is to be dreamt, forgotten, drawn on a wall or indeed erased. Showing the process of becoming, it is a piece that is all of its studies, changes and potentialities, echoing the exhibition in becoming a study for all that it can and could be.

And as yet another possible study discussing the form of an exhibition, Mathieu Copeland has edited a new publication, the third volume of his series entitled An Exhibition to Hear Read/Une Exposition à être lue. The book will be read out at 2pm every day for the duration of the exhibition. This publication features text based artworks by Robert Barry, Jarrod Fowler, Nicolas Garait, Karl Holmqvist, Bethan Huws, David Medalla, Yann Sérandour, Cally Spooner, and Sue Tompkins. These contributions consider the relation between a text as an art piece to be and its spoken realisation, questioning the ‘performativity’ of the act of reading from a book.

The David Roberts Art Foundation
111 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 6RY
http://www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

http://www.mathieucopeland.net

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