PR: Showcasing Fake Pisano’s major installation Instrument for a Spatial Conception of Repetition (2013), this exhibition is the second in Hollybush Gardens’ series ‘PRESENT’, a curatorial framework for exhibiting a single installation work of significance in the gallery space.
The series was devised with the aim to show existing and previously shown work in a situation where the work is able to articulate with the space and its audiences, and in doing so generate new discourses. As its title suggests, the series emphasizes the physicality of the work in the present moment, within the presence of the artist and indeterminate interlocutors.
Pisano’s Instrument brings together aspects of two preceding cycles of works, Figures of Speech (2006–2011) and The Body in Crisis (2011–). Figures of Speech consists of works in which linguistic objects are constructed and deconstructed, and subjectivity is considered in relation to given conditions. The work is heterogeneous in nature, comprising text, video, sculpture and diagrammatic elements that analyze authorship, agency and speech within works of art. This work sees the development of a method in which research, production, reflection and transformation are brought into proximity, enabling a practice that shifts from one mode to another.
The Body in Crisis addresses concrete and political moments within the repetitive occurrence of bodies being thrown into states of crisis through violent shifts in the conditions of life. The work centers on six historical moments: Pergamon in 199, Amsterdam 1571, Paris 1793, Mons 1915, Paris 1974, and Houston 1984. Each marks a change in the experience of the body, a node where histories of housing, medicine, architecture, gender, art, and economic and social environments intersect. For Pisano, these recurring moments of crisis, and thus the de- and reconstruction of body functions and fragments, constitute a historical matrix of violence whose structuring element is repetition itself.
Instruments is a modular work with an open character that considers the relation between the two earlier works in terms of methodology. Instruments consists of three screens, as well as five metal pieces considered ‘tools for directing perception’ that can be attached to the screens or presented as wall sculptures. These ‘tools’ are like fragments of a larger diagram setting out forces that influence our perception of a series of linked events. The posters attached to the metal pieces describe a point of view in relation to the perception of repetition.
Falke Pisano (b. Amsterdam) lives and works in Rotterdam. Her artistic practice scrutinizes the ways in which systems of thought are structured, formalized, and ultimately naturalized. Her series of works stem from long-term research cycles that delve into specific subject matters and undermine conventional frameworks of knowledge by triggering a continuous exchange between language, ideas, materials, and forms. Pisano’s work has been exhibited and performed at venues including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Praxes Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Showroom, London; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Berlin Biennale; De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Venice Biennale; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Biennale of Sydney; Manifesta 7; and Istanbul Biennial. In 2013 she was awarded the Prix de Rome.
Falke Pisano, Instrument for a Spatial Conception of Repetition, 2013, installation view. Photo: Andy Keate.
