Presenting documentary stories using techniques from fictional narrative cinema, these films aim to tell a greater truth than conventional reportage could offer
Since the start of the Greek debt crisis in 2010, austerity measures have had a profound impact on life in the country. From biennials to occupations, Ben Davis and Ara H. Merjian reflect on how the art scene in Athens has responded
Driving into Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, at 1:30 in the morning, a line from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice came to mind. Speeding past rows of newly-built but noticeably vacant high rises, the glowing orb of the yet-to-be completed Baku National Stadium – the main venue for the inaugural European Games which the city will host in June – and shuttered shop fronts bearing the illuminated signage of Western luxury brands, the Bard’s words seemed duly apropos. “All that glisters is not gold.”
Last spring I moved from London, where I'd been living for seven years, to St Ives. A mere 5½-hour train journey from the capital (or, if you're intrepid, a night on the sleeper train), the small Cornish town is perched close to Britain's southwestern tip. It's been a home to artists and writers since at least the 1880s. As the artist Linder – the inaugural resident artist at Tate St Ives, where I work – pointed out to me soon after I arrived in March, it's a place where the ghosts of modernism are everywhere palpable. It's also a place where, thanks to the legacy of artist-potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, the veil between art and craft feels especially thin.
2014 was a great year for cinephiles. The one regret I have is not having seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language (2014) in 3D, a film that is said to revolutionize cinema to the point where watching it in 2D, as I did, is pointless. Luckily, as far as 2D pleasures, there were plenty, starting with White Shadow (2013, 2014 release), a stunning debut by Noaz Deshe, so far scantily present on the festival circuit. Berlin and Los Angeles-based Deshe sets his film in Tanzania, inspired by real-life stories of Africa’s albinos, who are mercilessly hunted because their organs are believed to have healing powers. In the film, a young albino, Alias, escapes after his father’s ambush. Alias sells DVDs in a cutthroat city and finds companionship in a rural albino shelter, but is betrayed by his uncle. Deshe’s hallucinatory storytelling and edgy camerawork have a primal power, with a witchdoctor that channels Flannery O’Connor. Deshe stresses the sensory experience, and Alias’ plight is so agonizing, this is the one film whose vision and humanity continue to haunt me.
Art Check-in time was set for 2014. Were I compelled to choose from the various interesting trends in arts criticism and curation this year, it was perhaps the use of the hotel as both subject and installation site that offered the most excitement. It began with 'Room Service: On The Hotel In The Arts and Artists in the Hotel' at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, which assembled an impressive survey of (mostly) 20th century art's relationship to the hotel, as subject, artist's workspace, site-specific installation and performance space. Thankfully, the exhibition was not wholly indebted to the modern’s characterization of these interiors as Marc Augé’s non-places; rather, the inclusion of British landscapers such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable and Berlin flaneur/caricaturist George Grosz married painterly figuration to the evocative, surveillance aesthetics of Sophie Calle, and the therapeutic performance art of Ann Liv Young.
My favourite exhibitions over the past year were notable for serendipitous encounters with artists both familiar and new to me. Marsden Hartley's show at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Die deutschen Bilder 1913-1915, for example, was one such surprise. His brightly coloured paintings – often of collaged military insignia – reflected the formative years the American modernist painter spent in Europe. Yet the artist’s estranged sexuality was an underlying subtext, and his love for the soldier Karl von Freybourg, who died in the First World War, is evident in Portrait of a German Officer (1914); the centerpiece of this touchingly put together show. Also in Berlin, Marc Camille Chaimowicz turned Galerie Neu’s new space into an aviary for his show Forty by Forty, which featured the artist’s bespoke Italian-designed vases together with utilitarian pieces by Klara Lidén and Manfred Pernice – all of which played host to forty canaries who inhabited the exhibition throughout its duration. In a dilapidated altbau in Kreuzberg, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie displayed a series of sado-erotic drawings by Pierre Klossowski. Hanging on crumbling walls, or in front of casually draped black cloth, a faint air of decadence lingered in and around the apartment, which became a theatrical set piece for Klossowski’s dubious scenes of illicit activity. This incredible show created a lasting impression.
In December, while the international papers were busy excerpting the American Senate report on the Bush-era’s CIA torture, nay, ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme (use the language they choose for you), I sat at a table with my students in Geneva reading Etel Adnan’s epic poem from 1980 The Arab Apocalypse. ‘[A]n Arab tortured mutilated vomits the sun hangs from his feet. Meticulously. A yellow sun’, a student read. In August, I lay by the sea on Samos – Turkey glittering and bleaching just across the blue sea at my feet – and read Adnan’s seminal novella Sitt Marie-Rose, from 1978. It refracts the Lebanese Civil War through the story of a woman, sun-like, at its centre – a teacher, mother, revolutionary, and lover of a Palestinian doctor – a centre slowly ripped apart in front of the deaf-blind children she teaches. ‘Fouad is the perfect killer […] He prefers jeep-speed-desert-bird-bullet to girl-in-a-bed-and-fuck […] Bullets crack and resonate in the amphitheatre that is Beirut. The location is perfect.’
As ever, I listened to Graham Lambkin more than anything else. In particular, an album with Jason Lescalleet called Photographs (2013). The domestic field recording/improv thing Lambkin's been honing for years, reaches an incredible pitch of intimacy and reverie here. Landmass-scaled tones arrive abruptly, simply, at a kitchen table in Folkestone at teatime; a Church of England hymn folds back and drifts off in the back of a taxi, the indicator segueing into a pensioner’s carriage clock. Loss is it’s great subject and also its material, in that the scale of the thing – temporally, sonically – encounters experience and its vital irrecuperability, celebrating the vicissitudes of memory through a kind of emphatic now that cannot be retrieved, and is all the more extraordinary because of it. That, and an insistence on the public quotidian mapped through personal document – something that Richard Dawson’s album Nothing Important (2014) shares. In fact, the two sets of musicians (Lambkin/Lescalleet and Dawson) are in many ways twinned, not least in how they stir up a profoundly political sense of British life, written into its relations, cultures and aesthetics. Both albums are so, so moving, perhaps because they’re so totally, radically apart from the rhetoric of contemporary British politics. Theirs is an affective politics that intones the pain of the government's systematic destruction of the very structures their music is formed of and through. Which, of course, is precisely the thing which provides hope, even as it eulogises its passing. Drunk on a flight back to London, I listened to the titular song from Nothing Important, and cried.
How many enemies will I make if I say that 2014 was not a stellar year for art in Los Angeles? It’s true though. I put it down to a regathering of energies, a time for taking stock and inaugurating fledgling ventures. Many column inches have been lavished on the ongoing explosion of L.A.’s gallery scene but at this point we have less to show for it, in terms of memorable exhibitions, than one might expect. All is promise for 2015, but in 2014 there were relatively few major chords.
EXHIBITIONS In a year in which documenta 14’s Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk announced that his 2017 edition of the quinquennial mega show will be partly staged in Athens, the Greek capital played host to some fantastic exhibitions, not least in the independent spaces Kunsthalle Athena (‘This is Not My Beautiful House’, curated by Marina Fokidis), State of Concept (a solo show by Basim Magdy, curated by Iliana Fokianaki) and Totàl (‘They are indeed the principle of things, and yet they are not interpretable and empty as mirrors’, curated by Michelangelo Corsaro).
