Unceded Territories by Stephanie Moran

In the context of indigenous rights struggles in British Columbia, decolonization is not just a metaphor, an abstract theory, or a project of contemporary art: it is a real demand.

The title of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s major solo exhibition refers to the fact that the city of Vancouver (regularly in the top five index of the world’s best places to live) is built on land that has never officially been ceded to the Canadian nation by the First Nations bands that lived there for centuries before ‘settler’ immigrants arrived from Europe and claimed it as theirs, forcing the original habitants onto tiny reservation areas.

Yuxweluptun paints the British Columbian landscape peopled with stylized psychedelic representations of indigenous figures in contrast with the suited or lab-coated ‘white man’ with sinister mask-like faces. He seamlessly synthesises modernist forms and traditional First Nations styles into his own distinctive and individual painting language, depicting a personal mythological and shamanistic vision of the territories that reveals the underlying and usually invisible (to the non-indigenous ‘settlers’, tourists and visitors) political and societal conflict.

Yuxweluptun’s epic contemporary canvases deliver a condemning polemic in tones from the satirical to the raging, and visually articulate the injustices of the dispossession of the original peoples of Canada: the many different nations that were decimated and segregated, disenfranchised from their ancestral lands, still struggle to be recognized as nations in their own right, and to set the terms of negotiations over the territories they now share with the Canadian nation. The paintings of suited corporate figures reveals the ugly face of their greed to extract the land’s resources for profit, acts which doubly dispossess the First Nations peoples; whose business interest complicates any negotiation over land rights while wreaking massive environmental damage.

Other paintings show the religious aspects of First Nations’ peoples, as in Spirit Dancer Dances Around the Fire, a mystical painting of spirits dancing in the sacred ceremonial space of the longhouse. Viewers can walk around a longhouse space in the very early virtual reality piece Inherent Rights, Vision Rights, 1992, that Yuxweluptun created on a residency at the Banff Centre. The cyber-world of the VR piece suits the shamanic world-vision and psychedelic figures of the paintings, and translates them into the more familiar contemporary ground of video games. In a recorded interview from 1992, Yuxweluptun describes VR helmets as ‘the white man’s mask’, as he pityingly explains that this is the first time whites have made a cultural mask, and that they are generally unable to access other dimensions without the aid of technology.

Unceded Territories by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is on display at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver until 16^th October. 

(Text by Stephanie Moran 2016)

The Infinite Mix by Rebecca Hughes

An iconic brutalist office block on The Strand becomes the perfect venue for the Hayward Gallery’s new pop up space. This concrete maze offers up a weird, engaging, moving, and hilarious assortment of installations down each disorienting dark corridor. The Infinite Mix is devoted to experimental video, image and music, blending these elements to achieve total celebration of diversity. The feeling of entering a dystopian, futuristic universe is appeased by the nostalgia yearning of many of the installations, commonly rendering the bygone times hyper-modern, infinitely mixing past and present, concept and vision. This is an emotional and cerebral gallery experience that demands and rewards immersive intraction with all of its components.

A self-confessed Martin Creed fan, I was already delighted to be edging slowly down the first dark corridor towards the pop-punk sounds of the artist bellowing his song, “You Return”. Work No. 1701 lands us at a crossing on a New York intersection as we begin to watch people battle their way in various ways across the busy street. A guy with a prosthetic leg crosses nimbly, absorbed in the delicate dance of forward motion and instability. A woman crosses with the rising and dipping of a palsied gait. A man hops agonsingly over the striped crossing, foot waddled in a vast bandage. Themes of Creed’s sculptures reappear during this poetic video of the everyday - a celebration of motion, endurance and fortitude with an injunction to pause and see the world with fresh eyes.

Staying in New York for the next installation, we are catapulted into Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kishasa - a painstakingly recreated 1970s recording studio. There are some brilliant musicians in this fictional jazz-funk session, that seems to loop endlessly. The sound mix highlights each player, clad in a costume so meticulous it feels as though entering a sepia-toned time-capsule. The endlessness is simply a construct, each variation carefully edited and remixed by Douglas, the seeming improvisation nothing but a clever trick, the infinite fusion of sound and culture provoking feelings of timelessness and endurance, in a strange parallel with Creed’s overarching theme.

The third room, for me, is worth the visit alone. Ugo Rondinone’s Thanx 4 Nothing, featuring beat poet John Giorno, is humorous, compassionate and engrossing. Four large screens surround us, with tv monitors placed on the floor like stage footlights, providing different views and profiles of Giorno, standing strikingly in the proscenium of Paris’s Palais de Glace theatre. Elegant in black suit, white shirt and black tie, his feet stranegly unclad, he begins an affecting performance of an autobiographical spoken word piece thanking past lovers and friends for good sex and wild times, their intimacies and betrayal, the depression and joys of an underground life. Accompanied by glorious immersive music, Giorno is mesmerising, in equal parts funny and heart-breakingly poignant. Everybody who entered was enraptued by this bare-footed poet until the final puff of his contemplative cigarette.

Perhaps the most incredible use of space was Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Opera in which we are confronted with Maria Callas flickering in a narrow alcove of the building, behind an almost invisible barrier. A holographic apparition, Callas is played by the artist who lip-synchs to arias from Cherubini’s Medea, Verdi’s La Traviata and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. The echoes of the cold, concrete space around is threaten to absorb and overwhelm her plaintive howls, heightening the sensations of loneliness and wistful desire. This is a meditation on urban loneliness, a mesmirising yearning for something more, a soul roped off from the rest of the world, destined to play out this melancholy scene in darkess, untouched and unnoticed. If no-one is there to witness your creation, can you call it art?

Down in the basement, 3D glasses are donned to watch Cyprien Gaillard’s Nightlife. This complex video is the perfect example of interconnection. As a sequence of images alone it’s stirring stuff but it requires a few viewings and concentration to unfurl all the layers. Taking us from LA to Nazi-era Berlin, we end up floating above the Olympiastadion amongst an immense firework display, all accompanied by a looped, distorted line from Alton Ellis’s Black Man’s Word: “Aww-wah, I was born a loser,” Ellis wails, over and over.

The imagery all connects: the shattered Rodin sculpture we light on was bombed by the Weathermen, a Left-wing group connected to the Black Power movement; the Berlin stadium was Nazi-built and the spotlit oak tree is the one that Jesse Owens won in 1936 in that stadium. The quaking trees and illuminative fireworks are the images that remain, and that hanting refrain, “I was born a loser” - this is an ambiguous  and meticulously thought-out installation, combining scultpure, music and 3D visuals to incredible, provoking effect.

Kahlil Joseph’s m.A.A.d fills two-screens in a panoramic and intimate film; a chaotically disturbing but hauntingly beautiful portrait of Compton in LA. The pacing and suspense of the film keeps you hooked, swimming in the unnerving sensation of violence about to erupt, the jarring juxtapositions of street life and police brutality with gentle, warm scenes of domestic life, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship. The scenes veer from intensely realistic and shocking to a kind of macabre magic realism, that is stunningly matched with Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics, heightening narrative tension and propelling us towards an abrupt, but not uenxpected, finale.

Bom Bom’s Dream by Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea shows the fantastical adventures of a kamikaze dancer competing in a Jamaican dance scene. Her hilarious contortions are interspersed with deliberately crude fantasy scene of a chameleon, who eventually swallows her whole.

Cameron Jamie’s Massage the History, a title taken from the Sonic Youth track, documents bizarrely erotic dance routines revolving around furniture. The unexpectedness of this film, the incongruous elements of costume, set and music all align to make a a surreal and hallucinatory experience, where it is as much fun to watch the reactions of other visitors as it is to watch the film itself.

Elizabeth Price’s retro-feeling K is an ominous sci-fi confluence of CGI images of yellow stockings on a production line, flashes of footage of the singer Crystal Gayle, and an unnerving, synthesised voice promoting a fictional troupe of “professional mourners”. these disparate elements combine to create an unsual reflection on collective emotion and mechanisation of the modern world.

Rachel Rose’s Everything and More has all the right elements of a soaring, trippy installation, but somehow fails to move entirely. 1960‘s style psychedelic fractals swarm over a translucent screen that allows a view over London’s South Bank, a wonderfully imaginative use of the building, that should induce feelings of weightlesness to match the narrative, but somehow doesn’t. These galaxies of bubbles, and indeterminate liquids are used in conjuction  with a voiceover of US astronaut David Wolf’s descriptions of the jarring effects of returning back home from space, and being crushed by the weight of gravity (“I thought I had ruined my life, gravity felt so heavy, the watch like lead on my wrist”) and Aretha Franklin’s soaring vocals.

I entered the gallery as a trepidatious technophobe but emerged totally overwhelmed by the vast scope of vision that had been encountered and left with the certainty that audiovisual work is one of the most consistently creative fields of modern art.

The Infinite Mix is at the The Store at 180 The Strand, WC2 from Friday until December 4. 

Admission free

. www.theinfinitemix.com

(Text by Rebecca Hughes 2016)

Yerma by Rebecca Hughes

I first became aware of Simon Stone when living in Perth, and happily situated next to a beautiful old cinema specializing in Independent and Australian film. Whilst standing in line for a $5 ticket one evening I overheard a conversation about a young Australian director who had adapted Ibsen’s The Wild Duck into a movie. The story, it seemed, had been transposed to a small logging town in Tasmania. Although by no means a traditionalist, there was something about this notion that horrified me. This happens sometimes when a play is too close to your heart. The audacity of it! I fumed to myself. Intrigued by what I was sure was going to be a total massacre of a beloved play, I ensured I saw Stone’s The Daughter immediately. One of my greatest pleasures in life is being surprised and having prejudices and preconceived notions proved wrong. Stone had seduced me. His adaptation was radical and risk-taking, brilliantly reminding modern audiences of the relevance these classic plays still hold for us. In this fast-paced world where everything seems transitory and readily disposable these plays endure, and for good reason. The central messages are, and will continue to be universal, and provide wonderful companionship in times of happiness or of grief.

Stone has performed similar magic on Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic play, Yerma, originally set in rural Spain in 1934, now relocated to modern-day London. Yerma, meaning barren, is a play about the inability to conceive. The longer our heroine tries and the more times she is thwarted in her desire, the more her obsession consumes her and pitches her relentlessly towards a shocking end. Not a vestige of rural Spain remains in this production; this is a contemporary and strikingly relatable story, featuring a simply astonishing performance from Billie Piper. Stone demonstrates again his uncanny ability to highlight the female experience and draw out incredibly raw, visceral and emotionally-charged performances from his heroines. From the moment Piper bounds on to the stage, you are electrified by her flighty, effervescent presence, with a voice as captivating and startling as the intense physicality of her performance. She bounds into view, speaking relentlessly in a fast-paced chatter, almost irritating in her total self-awareness and sardonic humour which establishes our complicated feelings towards the heroine of this tragedy. The knowingness of her pouting and preening is recognisable in this selfie saturated era - highlighting a peculiarly female awareness of watching eyes, and how you appear to others.

The remarkable stage is encased by glass, trapping the actors inside, highlighting the modern themes of voyeurism, reality as entertainment, the spectator as complicit through passivity and awed interest. The glass cage serves many purposes; the constriction primarily heightens the activity and intensity of the characters’ unravelling, and mirrors their ordeal of being trapped by circumstance in an unavoidable fate. It acts in a meta way by mirroring her job as a lifestyle journalist and blogger in which she is also trapped in a screen, grappling with outsiders viewing and commenting on her life. Their enclosure renders us spectators equally vulnerable and exposed, with little mitigation from the relentless march towards tragedy.

Yerma’s husband, movingly performed by Brendan Cowell, enters languid and relaxed, gazing bemusedly as she trips around him like an errant fairy that he is intoxicated by, but cannot quite capture. His later incomprehension and anguished helplessness in the face of his wife’s disintegration is entirely sympathetic. Unavoidably a play about gender, it comments on the abyss that can exist between male and female visions of the world and the way we relate to ourselves and each other. A sense of futility and knowingess is afforded to the spectator from their obvious disjunction; the visible truth to everybody but themselves, that they, as her acid-tongued mother remarks, are simply ‘not compatible’. Nature’s hand cannot be forced, biology has is own way of dictating circumstance. This truth is made starkly clear when we learn that she had been able to conceive previously with her former lover, Victor, but had chosen to abort.

However swiftly she skips between emotional states, Yerma is never satirised or made melodramatic. Once again, this is due largely to the incredible vocal performance of Piper, the sensitive pitching and modulation of her voice depending on current emotional and mental state. In the beginning her speech is frothy, rapid, captivating in happiness but switches dramatically to a pained trickle as disillusionment and depression sets in, words crawl slowly out of her shaking lips as though hauled up from the deepest well of despair. A depiction of depression so frighteningly accurate and relatable that it can’t help but make you wonder how Piper manages to relive such an experience night after night.

In one particularly memorable scene, she sits apathetically slumped in her barren garden that she has been unable to cultivate; a cruel reminder of the emptiness of her womb. In obvious torment she claws frantically at her t-shirt, plucking it disgustedly from her, lamenting the wanton betrayal of her body. She lashes out cruelly at those around her like a tiger in a cage protecting her territory, but her territory is the grief that she cannot share with anyone. In disgust at herself she tries to make herself disgusting to others, alienating herself as her body has alienated her. The deft pacing, and rapid set changes hurtle you towards a violent ending that is simply inevitable.

Billie becomes more furious and terrifying in her frustrated, thwarted womanhood. In one of the final scenes, the muddy fields of glastonbury are transformed to a Boschish scene of sheer hell and surreal violence. The hysteria lurks and then springs with unexpected vehemence and abandon. Stefan Gregory’s brilliant Greek chorus soundscape magnifies the pitch and intensity. Music builds eerily and jarringly between scenes, which are introduced, Brecht-style, with dates and headlines on a screen: “A year later”, “An ex reappeared”.

This play also draws on Artaud’s idea of the Theatre of Cruelty - employing the language of symbols to unleash powerful unconscious responses. Instead of simply following dialogue, we learn the language of cages, trees, barren land, soil, and lightening. As Albert Bemel explains, this theatre of cruelty ensures that:

“Lighting, sound equipment and other technical means would no longer subserve the text; they would partially replace it. The noises, music and colours that generally accompany the lines would in places substitute for them. They would be fortified by a range of human noises- screams, grunts, moans, sighs, yelps...These would extend the range of the actor's art and the receptivity of the spectator. To put it another way, they would enlarge the theatre's vocabulary…They would surrender themselves to a performance, live through it and feel it, rather than merely think about it.”

Stone’s radical interpretation recognises that language occasionally fails in its function to relate painful experience and offer catharsis to those that suffer. This is a play of such power and devastating acuity it can be almost unbearable. The performances are unnerving and uncomfortable yet always electrifying. Relatable to those who have ever watched someone close to them in pain, been in a dysfunctional relationship, felt the heartache of thwarted desires, lost a child or their sanity.

Yerma is on at The Young Vic until the 24th of September

(Text by Rebecca Hughes 2016)

Terence Donovan: Speed of Light by Denni Rusking

Terence Donovan (1936-1996) was born and raised in the East End of  London. In his teens he joined the Bethnal Green Photographer's Club and his first efforts won him some prizes. After completing his National Service Donovan became involved with John French who had revolutionised the British press by giving newspapers the same high quality photos that previously were only seen in the pages of glossy fashion magazines. French was known for his indoor studio work but Donovan was more interested in taking photos outdoors, usually of tough looking James Bond type men wearing immaculate Austin Reed suits. Donovan's hero was Bill Brandt. Brandt's photos have a gritty feel about them, which you can definitely see in Donovan's work.

In 1960 Micheal Heseltine became publisher of Man About Town magazine. Heseltine changed the publication making it more about men's fashion. Around the time David Bailey would become famous for taking photos of glamorous women fir Vogue magazine, Donovan would make a name for himself taking photos of stylish men for Town.

Speed of Light is the first major retrospective of Terence Donovan's work and there is much to enjoy. It's nice to see the membership card from the Bethnal Green Photographer's Club and Donovan's collection of cameras, and his notes and letters. Donovan did well in the Thatcher years. His portraits of the great and the good from this period are quite stunning. It was in the 80s that Donovan made his best known work which is the video of Addicted To Love by Robert Palmer. Donovan filmed 5 models pretending to be Palmer's backing band. The gorgeous models appear to be in a zombie state. Their outfits are almost transparent and their make-up is overdone. They are disturbing, stunning and sexy and Donovan's video is one of the most memorable pop videos of all time.

In the 90s GQ magazine employed Donovan to take photos of dozens of British icons such as Lemmy from Motorhead. The portraits are all here, many of them are great images but I found myself thinking Donovan can't have been too excited about photographing Jarvis Cocker or Damon from Blur. By the mid 90s it's hard to think what was left for Donovan to achieve. He seen it all and bought the t-shirt. His friends and family were shocked when it was discovered Donovan committed suicide.

Donovan's ex studio and home in Bourdon Street is now up for grabs. The asking price is 18 million pounds. Outside his old head quarters there is a bronze statue by Neal French of Donovan photographing Twiggy. There's no doubt that Terence Donovan helped to make the 60s swing. This exhibition is a fitting tribute to a great talent.

The show runs until the 25th September.

 The Photographer's Gallery, (Floors 4 & 5), 16 - 18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW

(Text by Denni Rusking 2016)