Galeria Vermelho presents, from Nov 25th 2008 to January 17th 2009, the group exhibition show SILÊNCIO!
Curated by Audrey Illouz, the show presents works by Nathalie Brevet & Hughes Rochette, Manon de Bôer, Joseph Dadoune, Marilá Dardot, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Anne Durez, Laurent Fievet, Mauricio Ianês e Manuela Marques
Openning:: Nov 25th 2008, at 20h
Period:: Nov 26th 2008 to Jan 17th 2009.
HORÁRIOS:: thu to fri, from 10am to 7pm, Sat from 11am to 5pm, Sun and Mon closed.
Nov 29th
15H - Performance - Se eles se calam…(2008) by Anne Durez
16H - Performance by Maurício Ianês & Joseph Dadoune
17H – TALK WITH THE ARTISTS – participation of Audrey Illouz, Suely Rolnik AND THE ARTISTS OF THE SHOW
Silêncio !
“There is no such thing as silence. Get thee to an
anechoic chamber and hear there thy nervous
system in operation and hear there thy blood in circulation.”
John Cage1
The starting point of the exhibition Silêncio! is a song by Caetano Veloso entitled De Palavra em Palavra which was recorded on one of his most avant-garde albums : Araça Azul (1972). This text was written by Veloso after he came back from his exile in London. Dedicated to Augusto de Campos, it draws explicit references to concrete poetry. This piece uses typographical layouts, puns, palindromes, phonic mirrors and other visual and sound experiments and reaches its climax in a scream. This scream, uttered in the context of a dictatorship, blows full contradiction as a gap appears between the speech (the word “silêncio”) and the action (the scream).
The exhibition focuses on scream and its status within language: from a sound which is not yet an articulated word, from a primal expression, to a dramaturgy of speech. While the most famous representation of scream in the pictorial field is, no doubt, Edvard Munch’s eponymous work, it sets back the viewer into frightening muteness. Here, the impact of the image appears where the sound itself is absent.
Through an understanding of the scream as a vector between body and language, the aim of this exhibition is to work around forms of resistance that are linked to a physical, performative and linguistic experience such as shouting the word “silence”. The relationship between words and images may then be tackled differently.
As such, this project mingles several approaches. The physical approach was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s “xylophenic body2” – the idea of a to and fro between orality and writing, between written form and sonority, between the body stigmata and the shape of the voice3 - and it was nurtured by a core work, absent from the exhibition but nevertheless its keystone: Manon de Boer’s Resonating Surfaces (2005).
Through the portrayal of the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik who fled the dictatorship after she was imprisoned, this work evocates what can lie “encapsulated” in the speech and bursts out through the voice. It evocates the vibration of a vital energy where lies the resistance to the violence of the political power.
The exhibition evolves from the body, taken as a sensitive surface, where singing slowly yields to the primal scream in Joseph Dadoune’s Score N°1 for Three Moments of Origin (First Circle) to the primal fears that are triggered by Mauricio Ianês’ installation that traps the viewer, through the voyeuristic staging of the visitor who is turned into an unwilling accomplice of a fictional incident with Laurent Fiévet (Happy Scream, 2006)
At this point, sound and mute experiences are actually the two faces of a same coin: from the body struggling with the natural elements in Anne Durez’s Donnant (2006), to the body entangled within a self-centered exercise – placing one’s breath during a theater rehearsal in Manuela Marques’ Situation 3 (2005).
These mute experiences draw us towards more purely linguistic ones, such as the ordeal of silence and the attempt to record it through language in Marilá Dardot’s Sob Neblina (2004-2008) or the failure of communication at work in Manon de Boer’s Switch (1998) where the surface and the meaning of the language clash.
We move from a concealed meaning to a forbidden meaning with Nathalie Brevet_Hughes Rochette’s series Somebody Says (2008). Other puns, other linguistic new interpretations show up in Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain’s animation White Noise (2006). The phrase “white noise”, which refers to the light spectrum, draws into a clash two registers of language: one related to sound and the other to the image. Another influence of concrete poetry is revealed in Mauricio Ianês des-pe-nha-dei-ro’ (2008) sound poem which is reminiscent of the “xylophenic body”.
Each of the works mentioned above is shown in echo of other works by each artist – the latter having been especially created for the purpose of this exhibition.
Following the verbivocovisual poem by Caetano Veloso, the exhibition is built upon resumptions, repetitions, new interpretations; it is built upon plays with mirrors which can be distorting…
The scream could recede for yet unknown data… These are anthropophagic attempts, geographically unbound.
Free entrance
SITE:: Galeria Vermelho
ADDRESS:: Rua Minas Gerais, 350 – 01244010 – São Paulo – SP – 11 3138 1520 (NEW)
www.galeriavermelho.com.br – info@galeriavermelho.com.br
SPONSORED BY: Consulado Geral da França (São Paulo), Embaixada de Israel (Brasília), FAAP (residência artística).
1 In Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
2 Xylophenic is an English calque for Xylophène, a portmanteau word combining xylophone and schizophrène (schizophrenic).
3 From Evelyne Grossmann’s foreword to the 2007 Gallimard edition of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To have done with the judgment of god)
