Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century

Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century
Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, Cambridgeshire
16 February - 30 March 2014
Review by Marie d’Elbee

The air is thick, entangled with rainbow stains. A light fog renders perceptible particles of light in the darkness, swathing the works in a luminous halo. In the room the sound of bouncing balls resonates and mingles with the throbbing rhythm of an aged voice. Weightless ordinary objects seem to float in stellar space in front of a planet swept by intersidereal fluids.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Wysing Arts Centre presents ‘Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century’. This exhibition (accompanied by a special publication, ‘Where do you see yourself in twenty-five years’‘), displays new works from the 2013 artists in residence: Anna Barham, James Beckett, Keren Cytter, C’ile B. Evans, Michael Dean, Gustav Metzger, Rupert Norfolk, David Osbaldeston, Seb Patane, Charlotte Prodger and Florian Roithmayr.

‘Last year’s programme ‘Convention T’ explored hidden systems and structures, which was the loose thematic bringing together this selection of artists’, explains the curator Gareth Bell-Jones. The title of the show, stemming from Andrew Blair’s 1874 science-fiction novel of the same name, projects the futuristic utopia of that time. It introduces the idea of feeding the future with our knowledge of the past; a theme which will be developed throughout the course of Wysing’s busy events programme in 2014, including the innovative and highly anticipated ‘Futurecamp’ residency.

This exhibition proposes an environment of all possibilities, defying common laws of physics, matter and time. The room’s atmosphere recalls at times an alien disco, at others an institutional museum. Rendered tangible, the air confers to the works an odd corporeality that exceeds their objective limits. ‘I was thinking about how to historicise the contemporary; the artworks included display one stage in a much broader development of work for each artist. I wanted to take this one work made since their time at Wysing and give the appearance of permanence to something fleeting and transitory’ explains the curator, ‘I felt the theatrical spotlighting and haze would help remove the viewer from the familiar and strike a balance between the camp drama futurology can dip into with the solemnity and institutional framing of a Baroque exhibition at the National Gallery.’

Upon entering the room, Rupert Norfolk’s looped video piece ‘Balls’ shows basketballs defying gravity as they bounce endlessly at the exact same height in a contrastingly still environment. Anna Barham’s ‘Score (not quite tonight jellylike)’ irradiates rainbows across the room. Cryptic footnotes, legible up close, seem engraved into its holographic paper. As it changes colour it brings to mind the way cephalopods change skin pigments in reaction to their surroundings.

Originally recorded from a demonstration video explaining the cleaning of a squid, the text is edited and processed repetitively through voice recognition programs causing its meaning to ripple and transform. It describes the ink and insides being removed from the squid’s body, unwrapping itself like a mysterious shape shifter. As it hides within the folds of its lines, the text seems to bear a secret on the edge of meaning which deteriorates throughout the process, almost physically pushed through the mesh of the computer programs. It eats itself like an autophagic machine.

Gustav Metzger’s handwritten text ‘Lift Off’ is a cornerstone of the show. It reads: ‘When I was young I wanted an art that would lift off - that would levitate gyrate, bring different - perhaps, contradictory aspects of my being. The search for - the need to encapsulate varying kinds of contradictory elements, the urgency of stopping sharp - extinct - twist and: razor-sharp endpoint. After the experience, we expand reconnect with a normality which is not the same as it was. But normality once changed, is not the same.’ Here he recalls his idea of what art could be from when he was a child.

One of the other video works, Keren Cytter’s ‘Corrections’, also reflects on the endless possibilities of imagined situations. A twisted plot stages a breathtakingly steep mise en abyme of narrative structures as they explore the ‘potential of a moment that never existed(...) imagining moments that rise from the thought of potential actions, creating a potential of line of events’.

In a video piece by Seb Patane, Gustav Metzger recites an extract from Erwin Piscator’s piece ‘The Political Theatre’ (1929) to a saturated red projection. It is a cold January on the square. The narrator waits to go to war, his clothes are too large and his shoes do not match. He notices that his collar is five inches too big. The brutality and chaos of war contrasts with the vulnerability of the frail narrator. His foreign accent reinforces the feeling of loneliness, he is far from anything known, lost in a no-human’s-land.

The text narrated by Metzger echoes his own experience as a German Jew, who arrived in London as a child refugee in 1939. This particularly moving piece, which was made in collaboration when Patane and Metzger were at Wysing together, leaves one to imagine the artist’s own experiences surfacing through the voiced words.

‘Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century’ is a mind expanding exhibition. As the work reflects the research of the artists in residence, it captures snapshots of stretching universes in the course of interplanetary travel, stretching space, time and sense of self in a sci-fi entanglement.