Retrogarde

Featuring: Caroline Bergvall, Brendan Fernandes, Samson Kambalu, Matthew Metzger, Catherine Sullivan, and Samson Young

Retrogarde brings together an international group of contemporary artists exploring avant-garde strategies, histories, and archives in their work. Conceptually and formally, the works on view adopt a series of recognizable avant-garde forms—fusing play with the profane; detourning language, space, and matter; and working through performative actions and interventions—to address the politics of everyday life.

Matthew Metzger renders stills from video documentation of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal 1966 performance of Trio A into two abstract canvases, each stretched to the exact size of one of Philip Guston’s last abstract paintings. In these works the artist addresses the tussle between figuration and abstraction in the history of painting. In a two-channel video installation Catherine Sullivan restages performative actions by key Fluxus figures within a theatrical production of a 17th century Jacobean drama. In conflating these distinct traditions, Sullivan deconstructs the tropes of performance and asserts an avant-gardist commitment to a polyphony of form and meaning.

Across a collection of films from his Nyau Cinema series, Samson Kambalu brings into convergence the aesthetics of early European cinema and a myriad of influences including the urban interventions of the Situationist International, the scatological rants of Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, American spiritualism, and masquerade practices from South East Africa. Also on view is the artist’s interactive piece Holy Balls (2000), which invites visitors to play with soccer balls covered with pages from the Bible, simultaneously engaging them in an act of sacrilege and free-spirited expression.

This possibility of spontaneous action in the gallery is further accentuated by Brendan Fernandes’s series of wall-mounted posters. Informed by his training as a ballet dancer and prompted by a desire to resist western notions of the ideal body, the artist’s graphic and text-based scores call for queer, self-defined bodies to engage in movement. Adapting the methodologies of the musical avant-garde, Samson Young translates military strategies into musical notations that are inscribed into large granite pieces. Overlaid onto these surfaces is the Franz Fanon quote, “To speak a language is to take on the world.” Here the artist addresses the emergence of radical aural practices during moments of conflict as well as the relationship between language and power.

Drawing on ancient narratives of seafaring and issues of migration, exile and transnationalism, Caroline Bergvall’s multimedia installation Drift (2014) combines two murals with a sound piece and text. Creating a mimetic experience of flight in the gallery, this immersive work resists the capture of language and the body into a single recognizable form.

Retrogarde highlights the continued relevance of avant-garde approaches to art production today. The exhibiting artists’s attitude towards this lineage is not one of blind veneration but rather pervasive disobedience, echoing the transgressive actions of their predecessors. Consequently, the exhibition infuses other viewpoints, narratives, and contexts to open up our collective reading of avant-garde traditions.

Retrogarde is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and curated by Yesomi Umolu, Exhibitions Curator.

Related programming

Opening and performance
November 11, 6–8pm
Logan Center Gallery (915 E 60 St, Chicago)

Join us to celebrate the opening of Retrogarde featuring a special reading by Caroline Bergvall. 

Artist talk with Samson Kambalu and Jennifer Wild
November 12, 2pm
Logan Center Screening Room (915 E 60 St, Chicago)

A conversation with artist Samson Kambalu and University of Chicago Associate Professor Jennifer Wild (Department of Cinema and Media Studies), moderated by Yesomi Umolu, Logan Center Exhibitions Curator. 

This event is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and the Counter Cinema/Counter Media Project at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. 

All events are free and open to the public. 

Logan Center Exhibitions​
Logan Center Exhibitions presents international contemporary art programming at the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Reflecting the sprit of inquiry at the university, Logan Center Exhibitions focuses on open, collaborative, and process-based approaches to cultural production.