Yael Davids: A Reading that Writes – a Physical Act II
December 6–22, 2013
Pablo Bronstein: Enlightenment Discourses on the Origins of Architecture
January 24–March 15, 2014
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Hours: Tuesdays–Sundays noon–6pm
or until intermission; admission free
Yael Davids: A Reading that Writes – a Physical Act II
Gallery performances: Friday, December 6, 8pm and Sunday, December 8, 4:30pm
In A Reading that Writes – a Physical Act II, Yael Davids describes the landscape surrounding the kibbutz where she grew up: “Uphill were the beautiful ruins of the old Arab village Suba. We called it “the Arab Tzuba,” not fully realizing what that meant. We loved walking there as kids. It was a beautiful place with a beautiful view—this was nature.” As the script develops, we learn that the landscape had been the site of a Palestinian village, its population displaced and its buildings dilapidating into nature.
The ambiguous status of objects and places, and how this ambiguity produces meaning, is central to Davids’ projects. In her performance installations, she considers the intersection of personal and political narratives, memory and history, the private and the public, and examines the body as a site of convergences and conflicts. What are the traces of history on the body, how does it respond to political context, and how does it function as a location of artistic practice? For Davids the body operates both as a documentary vessel, registering the present, and as a living search for a place within the institution and the grid.
At REDCAT, Davids will collaborate with Los Angeles-based dance artist taisha paggett, and together they will activate the installation through corporal configurations while reciting a script. Determined by the arrangement of objects—wooden structures, ropes and large glass plates—their movement will trace a transformation from horizontality to the verticality and vice versa. Simultaneously a group of participants will rearrange the glass plates in response to the script and the architecture of the gallery. The remnants of the performance will remain on view to explore the possibilities of the gallery space as a medium for documentation.
Yael Davids (born 1968; Kibbutz Tzuba, Israel), based in Amsterdam, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, sculpture studies at the Pratt Institute (New York) and dance pedagogy at the Remscheid Academy (Germany). Recent solo shows include Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; M – Museum, Leuven (2012); Circus Gallery, Berlin (2012); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Picture This, Bristol (2010); and If I Can’t Dance Tonight, Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam (2009), among others.
Funded in part with generous support from Mondriaan Fonds and the Artis Grant Program.
Pablo Bronstein: Enlightenment Discourses on the Origins of Architecture
Opening: Friday, January 24, 2014, 6–9pm
The work of Pablo Bronstein is distinguished by a series of projects and public interventions in which, assuming the role of art historian, architect and choreographer, the artist reconstructs historical moments and mimics them in tableau vivants. Camouflaged within the guise of history and imitating (at least in appearance) architectural forms or urban lifestyles from a certain era, Bronstein reinvents the past with great subtlety, highlighting the uncertainty of its construction and revealing its multi-layer composition.
The newly commissioned project that Pablo Bronstein has carried out for REDCAT functions as a “staged essay” where the artist articulates, by means of a series of drawings and furniture, the origins of architecture from the naturalistic perspective of the Enlightenment. In a certain way, Bronstein satirizes the insistence with which Enlightenment architectural culture sought in its origins, and how they guaranteed a “nature” uncontaminated by historical events.
The inherent contradictions that Pablo Bronstein establishes between the drawings and furniture/buildings, the shapes they refer to, their irreducibility to pure theory or mere physicality, functionality or artifice, are also ironic comments about the role of art historians, highlighting the pleasure but also the danger of historical discourse. Pablo Bronstein establishes processes that enable fissures between the past and present, the human and inanimate and, above all, between the practice of history and lived experience. He also questions the common ground between the construction of discourse and the subject of study, as well as our own body and the way we look through objects, involuntarily searching for their capacity to reveal to us a history. As in any historical discourse, in the end Pablo Bronstein creates a temporary, incomplete setting, one that can always change shape, demonstrating to us that there is no single origin and that the original always seems to be preceded by its copy.
Pablo Bronstein (b. 1977, Buenos Aires) works in London. Solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2011); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011); Sculpture Court, Tate Britain, London (2010); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (2007).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication with an essay from Ellis Woodman (architecture critic and executive editor of BD, London).
Funded in part with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Special thanks to Herald St, London and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino.
The Gallery at REDCAT focuses on experimentation through new commissions that often mark the first major presentation by the featured artists in Los Angeles. Employing temporary structures and dynamic installations, the exhibition formats are flexible and continually reformulated to allow for a range of spatial and temporal possibilities. Through its annual series of exhibitions, publications, talks and other public programs, the Gallery highlights concepts and critical discourses that connect art with other fields and disciplines.
