Kihlberg & Henry This Building, This Breath (2015) Video with live voiceover Commissioned by fig-2, supported by the Art Fund, Outset, and Arts Council England
For its first online exhibition, Danielle Arnaud presents a screening programme of video and film works by Kihlberg & Henry; Neville Gabie; Oona Grimes; David Cotterrell; Paulette Phillips; and Suky Best, curated by Tess Charnley. This presentation will occur over the course of six weeks with a new work made available for streaming each week. The works explore ideas of spatial and bodily interiority and exteriority, solitude, communication and the elasticity of time; topics that resonate in this time of altered living (within and without our selves). They allude to the possibilities of healing, as well as the complexities that arise with this repair.
Each work will be available to stream for one week on the gallery website and also through the gallery mail out but can be accessed again if required (please contact us to do so).
Mis(sing)-Communication 20th April – 31st May 2020 at daniellearnaud.com
Screening Schedule:
W/C 20th April: Oona Grimes | u.e u.
Oona Grimes’ film u. e u. (2018), emerging from the eight months Grimes spent on a Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School of Rome, is a dance of sublime mis-communication and mis-translation, echoing a vignette in Pasolini’s ‘Uccellacci e uccellini’. Absurd jumpy hand gestures reference both kinesics from paintings and everyday communication. Using 16mm film cut with iPhone clips Grimes
chased language – both the learning and losing of it – the omissions, the torn, the discontinuity, the patches, the bad repairs. These looped slapstick-like fragments, stretch the commedia dell’arte element through repetition and abstraction, a Sisyphean rehearsal for a never to be released film.
Oona Grimes is a London based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing and clay making. Grimes has exhibited at Matt’s Gallery, London; The Bower, London; Tintype, London; Danielle Arnaud, London; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, and more.
W/C 27th April: David Cotterrell | Mirror III: Horizon
David Cotterrell’s work Mirror III: Horizon (2016) reflects on the history, politics and geography of the island of Malta, against the fluctuating paranoia of the refugee crisis, through a single metaphor of two strangers communicating with each other through light, across darkness and ocean. The footage for Mirror III was produced simultaneously by two camera crews led by Ruwanthie de Chickera and Cotterrell. Both teams were equipped with custom fabricated morse-code generators and maritime lights. The shore and sea teams communicated across a mile of open water through the intermittent flashing of lights, re- enacting the encoded words of a series of dramatic performances scripted by de Chickera.
David Cotterrell is an installation artist working across media and technologies to explore the social and political tendencies of a world at once shared and divided. Cotterrell’s work has been commissioned and shown extensively in Europe, the United States and Asia.
W/C 4th May: Kihlberg & Henry | This Building, This Breath
Kihlberg & Henry’s work This Building, This Breath (2015) begins with a meditation – a voice guiding the viewer through an increasingly intense series of thoughts, leading to the idea that the room itself might be breathing: that architecture and the body are becoming one. A wide selection of found footage explores cultural ideas of breathing, but also of buildings in motion: a giant earthquake simulator, powerful tsunamis carrying houses, elevators in free-fall, amalgamated with their Hollywood equivalents. The work was conceived as an installation in which the audio was delivered live from behind the screen.
Kihlberg & Henry are Karin Kihlberg (Sweden 1978) and Reuben Henry (UK 1979), a collaborative duo based in London. Their work presents architecture as a biological event, an over-spilling of the human mind into exterior space. They have had solo exhibitions and projects at the Whitstable Biennale; fig-2 at ICA, London; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; Plymouth Arts Centre; Danielle Arnaud, London, and more.
W/C 11th May: Neville Gabie | Experiments in Black and White XXX
Neville Gabie’s film Experiments in Black and White XXX emerges from research he was commissioned to do in 2019 by UCL (University College, London, Trellis Commissions) into the impact of Motor Neuron Disease, which included visiting with Mrs Begum, a woman in the last debilitating stages of the disease. Much of that initial research remained unresolved until it found a fusion with Neville Gabie’s own concerns in performance, drawing and endurance. With the artist in a fixed position, his shoes nailed to the floor, Experiments in Black and White XXX explores the very limits of reach and movement. Confined to the studio, in a strange irony this work only found its final form during the last few weeks’ COVID-19 induced lockdown, a time when all our social interactions and movements have been drastically limited. Neville Gabie works in a range of media from sculpture to film and performance. His work is primarily concerned with the socio-political relationship to place and community. He has been commissioned and exhibited his work extensively internationally and is currently working on a new project with Manchester International Festival.
W/C 18th May: Suky Best | The Sea House
Suky Best’s video The Sea House (2014) is a collaged animation of historic interiors and live footage of the sea. Made in black and white, the elements have been put together roughly to make their construction and the clash of imagery obvious. The images fit, but not quite. The black screen with a moving slit, reveals small areas of the interior making the viewer focus on details that might otherwise be overlooked. The interiors are seen as fragments, but heard in their entirety, both excluding us from the space and making it more alluring. Each room has its own sea, with its own sound and atmosphere.
Suky Best is an artist based in London working with print, animation and installation. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at BALTIC, Gateshead and Pumphouse Gallery, London, and has had work screened at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Her work was also included in Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain.
W/C 25th May: Paulette Phillips | The Quoddy Fold
Paulette Phillips’ film The Quoddy Fold (2019) is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this hour long film, Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mould, and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea. Phillips’ performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history and intersubjectivity of space, place and species. Through the poetics of the ruin, The Quoddy Fold is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape giving space to entertain the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.
Paulette Phillips is an artist primarily working in sculpture and film, whose work deals with the relationship between viewer and subject, focusing on witnessing, looking and reflection. Phillips shows her work primarily in the UK, France and Germany and her work is in a number of public collections.
