The Tiger’s Mind
A film by Beatrice Gibson with Will Holder, Alex Waterman, Jesse Ash, Céline Condorelli and John Tilbury.
16mm transferred to HD, 23 minutes
November 2012–April 2013
The Showroom, London
14 November 2012–19 January 2013 (closed 23 December–8 January)
Preview: 13 November, 6:30–9pm
Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
15 December 2012–24 February 2013 (closed 20 December 2012–7 January)
Preview: 14 December, 6.30–9pm
CAC Brétigny, Greater Paris
March–April 2013
www.theshowroom.org
www.indexfoundation.se
www.cacbretigny.com
The Tiger’s Mind (2012) is an abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a Brutalist villa. Six characters—Tiger, Mind, Tree, Wind, Circle and a girl called Amy, (the set, music, sounds, special effects, director and narration respectively)—battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another.
The Tiger’s Mind was developed as part of a publishing project initiated by Holder and Gibson, which deploys composer Cornelius Cardew’s 1967 narrative score The Tiger’s Mind as a means for producing speech. Six practitioners from different fields were invited to four week-long conversations, each adopting one of Cardew’s characters. The fourth conversation saw the development of the film’s production elements. The final film presents a document of its own making in fictional form, extending narrative and character to the production process itself: Tiger’s sets, Mind’s music, Wind’s effects, Tree’s sounds, Amy’s narration and Circle’s direction all knock up against each other in a battle for primacy.
Extending the logic of the score to include the film’s exhibition and distribution, The Tiger’s Mind will be re-iterated differently at three institutions. The publication The Tiger’s Mind, edited by Holder (Sternberg Press, 2012), accompanies its varying exhibitions.
The Showroom, London
13 November 2012–19 January 2013
The Showroom presents the film’s premiere, and features a second related film, Agatha (2012). The exhibition explores Gibson’s interest in musical modes of production and their potential relation to film. It is accompanied by a concert by radical free-improvisation group AMM concert (Tilbury and Eddie Prévost) and a screening and discussion of William Greaves’s 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, with Gibson and Mike Sperlinger (LUX).
Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
15 December 2012–24 February 2013
At Index, Ash stages a scene from his current film project Avoidance―Avoidance (A Project of Transparency), based on the film Dada (Mary Ellen Bute,1936). Ash deploys Bute’s scene as a stage in which to present the developing narrative component of the project: two actors read a script, set amongst formally reduced models of stages for political speech. The exhibition presents itself as a conversation between Ash and Gibson that traces narrative territories, in which objects and props stand in for speech.
CAC Brétigny, Greater Paris
March–April 2013
The French cinema premiere of The Tiger’s Mind will be presented by Pierre Bal-Blanc at the Centre Pompidou, Paris on 19 January in collaboration with the Hors Piste Festival, which is showcasing Gibson’s films as part of their Artist in Focus programme.
This will be followed by the larger exhibition at CAC Brétigny in March, which includes Gibson’s full filmography. Unfolding as a series of events, the exhibition opens on 23 March with Holder and Waterman in conversation and rehearsal for a third public reading from Yes But Is It Edible?, a scored biography of American composer Robert Ashley for two or more voices (edited by Holder and Waterman, forthcoming from New Documents, Vancouver).
- Film co-commissioned by The Showroom and CAC Brétigny, in partnership with Index – the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation and Somesuch and Co. London.
- Additional support from Fluxus Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Art, Arts Council England, Outset Contemporary Art Fund (The Showroom Production Partner 2012), and The Showroom Supporters.
- Kunstverein, Amsterdam (with Straat van Sculpturen) and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart contributed to the project.
- The exhibition is realised in the framework of COHAB, a two-year project initiated by The Showroom, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, realised with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.
