Tonight in Istanbul - Rodeo

17.04.08- 31.05.08

Preview: Wednesday 16 April 7-9 PM


Tamar Guimaraes
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Kramer
Adam Leech


Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Sylvia Kouvali

Tamar Guimaraes
Listed Entries…
2006
Audio track, 16mm projector

In the early 19th century, Jan Leton was given as a gift to the bailiff of Skagen - a small village in the north of Denmark, at the height of Denmark’s involvement in the Americas. An entry on the church book recorded Leton’s death in 1827, referring to him as the bailiff’s servant. It is the only official document in which his presence in Denmark is marked in writing during his ‘lifetime’, he’s been mentioned periodically in local newspapers and local history accounts from 1877 onwards.
Listed Entries is an index, or a dictionary with missing letters, listing the disparate ways Jan Leton’s presence in Skagen has been formulated orally and in print, based on information collected from Skagen’s death register, newspaper articles catalogued in Skagen’s local history museum and oral accounts. It spans a period of 178 years, from 1827, the year of Leton’s death, to 2006.
The lists are organized alphabetically and chronologically, preventing the narrative from progressing horizontally. Sliced vertically, the narrative proceeds according to topic and chronology, repeating at the same point like a broken record or the return of a past coming back to haunt the present. These ‘archaeological cuts’ expose historical discrepancies according to period and zeitgeist. Layers of sedimentary time encoding the political consciousness of its moment, the dates at the end of each entry are the dates of publication for the books and newspaper from which information is gathered.

Christodoulos Panayiotou
Act 1: The Departure
2008
framed images, theatrical backdrops

The work unfolds several possibilities of synopsis for a theatre play, excluding its language or actors, by only displaying an old folded theatre backdrop, accompanied by its archival photo indicating what might be displayed. Act 1 reveals the beginning of a colonial journey, a work in progress that will be followed by “Act 2: The Island” and completed by the final, third act: The Glorious Return.

Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Kramer
The infinite Library (an insert)
2008
various media

To reassemble two different books in a manner that each second page of one
book would be put together with each second page of the other, would result
in two volumes of similar weight, though varying in content, both unique in
their totality. If every book was to be taken apart and then combined with
another, an infinite library of readable or unreadable volumes would emerge,
a constellation of non-identical books establishing variant new systems and
approximations through juxtaposition and replacement. Imagine that all books would be treated in such manner no book would be left untouched or unaltered. Dismantling and deconstructing all books would mean that their initial purpose and origin would be disturbed. There would be no categories; no science or fiction books, no religious
writings or educational texts, but one homogeneous volume of books containing
another kind of knowledge. The knowledge found in this library would be
vast and infinite, an 'omnium-gatherum' full of cross-references based on
chance and the theory of probability. The purpose of each book would
simply be in its very nature, to be a book, containing possibility. There
is no assurance that anything written in such book would be true, neither
false, as this condition of becoming would be inhuman and coincidental, the
authority coming from the book itself. Censorship would not exist as authorship
would no longer be valid.

Adam Leech
Money, lots of money
2008
DVD

For Money, lots of money, Leech constructed a character highly intelligent, paranoid, multifaceted and compulsive at the same time. Inspired on the notion of Autism,
an absurd dialogue between an interviewer and an interviewee formulate questions and answers between various “characters” that intermix and complement each other, therefore losing all sense of its purpose. In this way, the information becomes a performative act in itself.