JENNA COLLINS AND ALICE REKAB

TWO EXTERNAL LIGHT SOURCES AT THE SAME TIME
A duo exhibition of new work by Jenna Collins and Alice Rekab

17-18 February 2018
open: Saturday- Sunday 12-6pm
preview with performance: Friday 16 February 6-9pm

TWO EXTERNAL LIGHT SOURCES AT THE SAME TIME installs two distinct bodies of work that share an interest in the conditions, mechanics and operations that the activity of artistic production in any given circumstance articulates.

Jenna Collins presents an attempt to materialise processes of moving image production that occur prior to the final render, uncoupling speculative activities such as casting locations, actors and technologies from a predetermined end product to think about where else it might lead.

Alice Rekab presents an installation that repeats and re codes the same object across different locations and time lines, the object becomes the focus for narratives and discussion and in turn forms a starting point for wider considerations about arts function on and off camera.

Jenna Collins

Jenna Collins drops three lines from the Pier Paolo Pasolini screenplay, St Paul, into the junkspace of contemporary non-cinematic moving image production and lets it proliferate.

The ship is already far away, sailing toward the high seas. Internal dissolve.
The ship is but an imperceptible point on the blue. Fade.
(This scene will be filmed in real life, ‘stolen’ as one says in cinematographic jargon: therefore extras are not necessary, but only the three actors.)

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977

The work begins with archive material relating to the production of moving images and the apparatus it utilises -technical, imaginative or otherwise. The resulting installation takes shape around a recorded script about a location visit to a bar on a pier, a process of cataloguing, appraisal and extraction. The attempt to describe what is seen or what might be made to be seen is played out in a compilation of youtube videos of camera zoom and night functions tests in which we learn that, “you can’t use night mode for the moon”. Further image, text and sculptural elements play out gestures of casting, revision and rendering.

Jenna Collins recent activity includes: Exhibitions TLC at Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba and Gotland Art Museum, Visby, Sweden, and The Grand Alliance, solo exhibition, Quick Millions, London; residency at The Bergman Estate, Faro, Sweden; screening at the BFI 59th London Film Festival and Akbank Short Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey; radio broadcasts Broken Dioramas for Radio Quantica, Portugal, Radiophrenia, CCA, Glasgow and Resonance FM, with We Are Publication, London; and performances in Plague of Diagrams with Rachel Cattle, ICA, London, and The Fifth Runway with Paul Carr, Modern Art Oxford and the Camden Arts Centre, London.

www.jennacollins.com

Alice Rekab

A nomoli is the Temne name given to the strange figurative objects of unknown origin found buried in the ground both deep and shallow on various sites in Sierra Leone. Sometimes it is marking a rich seam of gold in a mine deep inside the earth; other times their placement is seemingly random, unearthed by a hand or spade in a rice field. They are believed to bring or to signal abundance. If you take them out your harvest will fail. Some believe they are manmade and others that they are formed by the earth to resemble gods.

Alice Rekab presents videos and sculptures which form a central island within the exhibition space. The sculptures create a material and gestural linkage between two seeming disjunctures in geographic, cultural and economic space through variations of the nomoli.

The video works show performances and interviews with the comedians People Pikeen and Saidu Temperature and the philosophers Anne-Françoise Schmid and François Laruelle, in each of these films the same object appears and is integrated into the conversation, these conversations in turn appear alongside audio recordings of the artists questions and footage taken on a tour of the Memorial Garden at the Sierra Leone Peace Museum and the National Museum in Freetown June 2014.

Through comedy, melodrama and documentary the video seeks to perform in the most explicit, hyperbolic way questions concerning the relevance of the artist, the transference of value onto objects and the reproducibility of that value through various economies: financial, aesthetic, affective, knowledge based or otherwise. Caught on film, these fractured and inconsistent narratives are the lasting impressions of a time where the artist and her role as a producer of contemporary art felt radically inadequate yet persisted in that inadequacy for better or for worse.

Alice Rekab recent activity includes: UCD Parity Studio Residency at University College Dublin 2017/18, The Integrated Relation at Tate Liverpool (forthcoming Feb 2018), Broken Dioramas for Radio Quantica, Breaking Emmets Block, a Public Art Commission, Pearse Museum, Dublin, Exquisite Games with Bodies (A=0): finissage, MACAO, Milano, Conjuncture In-Film, Showroom Gallery, London, Affective Vectors, a Performance for The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old at The Collection & Usher Gallery, Lincoln, Vector/Attractor, a solo exhibition, for the Return Gallery, at Goethe Institut Dublin.

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