Elisabeth Subrin, Shulie US 1997, video, 37mins

24 May – 24 June
Private view: Wednesday 23 May 6-9pm

Works in exhibition | Invisible Mend events

Lounge, 28 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ www.lounge-gallery.com

Opening times: Thursday – Sunday 1–6pm or by appointment

Chrissy Coscioni, VALIE EXPORT, Emma Hart & Benedict Drew, Jasmina Fekovic, Ursula Mayer, James Richards, Jonty Semper, Elisabeth Subrin

Since the beginning of the twentieth century artists making moving images have exploited industrial cinema as ‘found’ images to be reinterpreted, manipulated and represented as art. Invisible Mend, a group show of mainly young artists, presents a collection of works that seem to strategise in a similar way while actually drawing their material from radically different sources, simulating the look of the ‘found’ or exploring as much a set of radical (over) identifications with their subjects as a set of formal, political or historical questions. 

The works vary wildly in their aesthetics but what they have in common is an exploitation of the invisible: refutations of the permissible in the name of personal or political expression, a rewriting of history and to travel through time and space, through imaginary forays against and within dominant culture, escaping into new landscapes of desire. Criticality is manifested through an ebullience that replaces strict analysis with intuition, an interplay of emotional registers and often a disarming sense of celebration.

As well as the exhibition at Lounge, Invisible Mend extends into a series of events throughout June.

Invisible Mend is curated by Ian White and LUX.

A LUX/ Lounge collaboration

Works in Exhibition

Chrissy Coscioni
Thermoplastic, UK/US 2006, 16mm on video, installation, 10mins
A torrid montage of sound and image seemingly from the 1970s yokes together popular period idioms, apocalypses and artistic practice. Newsreel, television shows and material actually shot by the artist in the late 1980s together fuse the ‘present’ with the up-rush of a faux split-screen utopian past.

Jasmina Fekovic
Goddess… Whatever happened to love?, NL/Cyprus 2004, video, single-channel projection, 6mins
Maya Deren is relocated from her outstanding, seminal film At Land (1944) to Cyprus, the mythical birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite and transmigrates into the body of the actress and model Anouck Lepère. Through appropriated footage and uncanny pastiche, Deren/Aphrodite/Lepère magically heals the wounds of this divided island.

Jonty Semper
Kenotaphion, audio CD, 2001
A presentation of newsreel and broadcast archive recordings of the 2minute silences from Remembrance Sunday services in London, dating back to 1926. The title is taken from the Greek words from which the word cenotaph is derived and literally means 'empty tomb'.

James Richards
Untitled merchandise (lovers and dealers), machine knitted nylon blanket, 2007
A series of six knitted bedspreads each of which depicts a different lover or art dealer of renowned painter Keith Haring, photographed alongside him during his meteoric rise to international success in the 1980s. Manufactured by an American company that specializes in commemorative blankets for the families of soldiers on service abroad, the series transposes its souvenir template from those on military duty to the more private battlegrounds of class, race, desire and ambition.

Elisabeth Subrin
Shulie, US 1997, video, 37mins
A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, Elisabeth Subrin's Shulie uncannily and systematically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and time out of joint- and in Subrin's words, 'to investigate the mythos and residue of the late 1960s.' Staging an extended act of homage as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism and the author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Reflecting on her life and times, Shulie functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film. - Mark MacElhatten and Gavin Smith, curators, Views from the Avant Garde. 35th New York Film Festival

Events

Wednesday 30 May, 7pm for 7.30pm start
INVISIBLE MEND SALON: SHULIE
On the occasion of the Invisible Mend exhibition, LUX Salon takes the opportunity to screen Elizabeth Subrin’s SHULIE in a female only study salon.
Subrin resurrected a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, Shulamith Firestone, who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism and the author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Subrin’s version re-creates the original, shot for shot, and in the process arcs 40 years of feminism. Using the film as a catalyst to form a discussion group we will look at the issues that resonate through the film; about identity, the construction of histories and how they reflect on the current interest in feminist work and assess the significance. Facilitated by Jackie Holt and Emma Hedditch. LUX Salon takes place at LUX office, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ. Admission Free but places are very limited so pre-booking is required, to book a place email salon@lux.org.uk

Thursday 7 June, 7pm for 7.30pm start
INVISIBLE MEND SALON: DEVOTION curated and presented by James Richards
A collection of videos and found footage which are very much about the camera/editor as an off screen character with an ambiguous or subverted relationship to the events being depicted in the video. While often awkward or obsessive in tone the material shown is also about fantasy and the re working of found material or the staging and depiction of events as an act of devotion..including work and found footage by James Richards, Steve Reinke, Anne McGuire, Matthew Probert, Kim Fielding, and mary cigarettes.
LUX Salon takes place at LUX office, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ.
Admission Free but places are very limited so pre-booking is required, to book a place email salon@lux.org.uk
also late opening of Invisible Mend exhibition open until 9pm at Lounge, 26 Shacklewell Lane, E8 (same building as LUX)
Works included
Anne McGuire - Joe Dimaggio 1, 2, 3, The Waltons, When I was a Monster
George Kuchar - Going Nowhere
Steve Reinke - extracts from the 100 videos
James Richards - Practice Theory, Photoshoot Edit (with Kim Fielding)
Mattthew Probert - Hamburg Hotel Room Situation
mary cigarettes - Am I Normal

Sunday 10 June, 8pm, £5
INVISIBLE MEND PERFORMANCE
Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola Street, London E8. (tickets from Arcola box office, 020 7503 16 46 http://www.arcolatheatre.com/)
EMMA HART & BENEDICT DREW, JAMES RICHARDS & KEVIN HOWBROOK, MARK LECKEY
An evening of live works that cross between cinema and performance, strategies of appropriation and magical formalism.
To a projected backdrop james Richards and Kevin Howbrook present an improvised music and spoken word performance. Using turnatebles and a sampler james creates live sound designe and foley fx for the video footage and stories read by Kevin.
In Emma Hart & Benedict Drew’s Untitled Two a 50-foot length of film with black and white frames is projected by running the filmstrip from the projector and through the strings of an electric guitar held by Drew who stands in front of the screen. The string is plucked each time a splice passes. The effect is disconcerting as the increasingly staccato flashing of the projector, in tension with the distorting guitar strings, takes the viewer into a territory that is immediately personal, sexual and mesmerizing.
Plus CINEMA-in-the-ROUND a lecture by Mark Leckey. Professor Leckey presents a specially conceived collection of film, video, sculpture, painting and other works that "come to life" on screen, grasping as much at intangble mass, weight and volume as the indescribable essence of objects of which he is enthralled. Leckey shifts between an essay on the nature of images, the magic of cinema and an anti-authoritarian art history to an impassioned, personal declaration on the stuff of things in the material moment that we see them on screen.

Friday 15 June, doors 9pm starting at dusk, £3
VALIE EXPORT: Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner)
LUX, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ (outdoor rooftop screening)
EXPORT’s seminal first feature is a tour-de-force of radical paranoia presented in a special rooftop screening overlooking the city. Anna wakes to a radio signal that she interprets as an alien invasion. Her investigations are an exegesis on the self, mental instability, the media and sexual politics. 'The film feels a little as if Godard were reincarnated as a woman and decided to make a feminist version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers' Amy Taubin. Presented in collaboration with Cinenova www.cinenova.org.uk and with thanks to Faction Films. Booking essential as places are limited, email salon@lux.org.uk

Thursday 21 – Saturday 23 June, 3 - 5 pm
INTERIORS, URSULA MAYER
2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, NW3 1TH Telephone: 020 7435 6166
Admission prices to house (including film): £4.90, child £2.50, family £12.30
For visitor information about the house please see
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-2willowroad/
Shot to a high finish in the house at 2 Willow Road designed by the architect Ernö Goldfinger, the location for its exhibition here, two women – one old, one young – move through a set of modernist rooms, across hallways and up and down stairs, never meeting, never speaking. They variously gravitate towards and linger around what looks like one of the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s infamous, intimate works.
Presented as part of Architecture Week 2007.