Looking Forward while Looking Back
With works by Sophie Dupont, Io Makandal and Freya Powell.
Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen
June 19 - July 10, 2020
Virtual Exhibition
The circumstances and events that have developed in the past weeks have brought feelings of despair, tension, anger, fear and frustration, only to name a few. In the middle of a series of protests the question of how we each fight for justice arises.
For this iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back we have brought together the work of Sophie Dupont, Io Makandal and Freya Powell. Their works intersect as expressions of recognition of different contemporary tragedies (states of unease); as ways of confronting, challenging, dissenting and honoring what has been lost.
“Pervasive forms of inequality have established that some lives are disproportionately more livable and grievable than others”(1). In this context, Only Remains Remain, by Freya Powell, pays homage to the lives of unidentified migrants in mass graves by exploring the mournful potential of the human voice through pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and pause, invoking the silence of their burial and acknowledging our collective complicity and grief.
Sophie Dupont´s Body Full of Breath performance investigates what it means to be alive by fully filling her lungs and emptying them –evoking the cycle of life and death– at a time where the ability to breathe becomes an act of resistance that enables a voice, a movement, and a shared wind.
For Io Makandal, monuments reflect societies that are obsessed with a distorted idea of progress. They act as fictional spaces and places that illustrate an ambiguous relation between dreamed and created environments. In Life in the Entropics, Makandal rebuilds structures with detritus of the city of Johannesburg as material expressions of chaos and dis-order.
From material expressions of entropy, to the collective power of the voice when mourning, and asserting our equal state as human beings at the moment of existing, these works explore different ways in which, from the personal to the collective, we aim to recover our rights to mourn, to be named, to demand change, to re-build, to breathe.
(1)Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence
About the artists:
Sophie Dupont
The center of Body Full of Breath is one of the most basic mechanisms of the human body: Breathing.
A copper plate shaped like a lung is hung on a wall. For 60 minutes, the artist applies a small hole in the copper plate for each exhale she takes. Between the exhalations, she either stands still or breaks out, until her lungs are filled with air again and emptied, while a new hole is inserted in the copper plate.
Io Makandal
Life in the Entropics is an installation piece that formed part of Io Makandal’s solo show of the same name in July 2019 at the Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg. Comprised of a collection of urban detritus collected from the streets of Johannesburg, an African cosmopolitan city obsessed with its progress, Makandal reflects on its contradictions and the material expression of entropy in a time conditioned to ambiguity. Life in the Entropics presents an ephemeral monument to the Entropic; an (imagined) place in a time of uncertainty where dis-order and dis-ease is the mode of being while leaning into the trouble.
Freya Powell
Most recently I have been working on Only Remains Remain which is a 15-person performance that was going to be premiering at PS1 last month but was postponed due to the pandemic. Footage from a rehearsal at the Center for Performance Research edited with footage of a rehearsal via Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic can be watched here.
Only Remains Remain, uses the structure of a Sophoclean chorus to create an elegy for the hundreds of unidentified migrants buried in mass graves in Sacred Heart Cemetery in Brooks County, Texas. Working with an ensemble of 15 performers, I have been exploring the mournful potential of the voice. Through a collaborative process, the work utilizes pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and silence to embody a contemporary tragedy drawn from the story of Antigone.
Due to COVID regulations, attendance is limited for the opening reception.
NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.
