Kihlberg & Henry: Footnotes to a Long Distance Telephone Call | Danielle Arnaud | feat. Disembod
Kihlberg & Henry, A Mountain Close Up is Only Rock, video still, 2016
For their forthcoming exhibition Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry have invited the Disembodied Voice research group to show new works and host a series of events. The group includes Maia Conran, Patrick Coyle, Karen Di Franco, Kihlberg & Henry, and was formed in 2014 as a format to explore manifestations of the disembodied voice within their own work and in wider culture. The disembodied voice, and its often inevitable re-embodiment in objects other than the original speaking body, are variously reflected in the exhibition and its associated events, from the recorded voice in moving image to its traces in written correspondences and archives.
Kihlberg & Henry's video work A Mountain Close Up is Only Rock forms a digitalogical dissection of deceased architect Jørn Utzon. Narrated by a series of unfixed voices in combination with an associative flow through Utzon's digital footprint, the video envisions an obscure afterlife in the traces of the architect's mythical house on Mallorca, its geographic location kept private by the architect and its evidence on the internet scant.
Patrick Coyle will be posting a series of items to Danielle Arnaud which will be on display for the duration of the exhibition. Envelope Opening for Closing Event will deliver the promise of its title on the final day of the exhibition, when Coyle will deliver a performance in which he opens these items and uses them as a script.
Karen Di Franco will present I Decide Not to Operate Without Direct Communication. A postcard from Lee Lozano located in the archive of writer and critic Barbara Reise is taken as a starting point to discuss the temporalities of the archive. The philosopher Karen Barad has described the archive as trace rather than repository - as an assemblage of interactive phenomena. By articulating documents, the presentation will explore such interactivities.
In Maia Conran's video work Meat, a film studio lighting rig is re-purposed as the protagonist of a scripted psycho-narration. Internal monologues, social desires and multiple selves are revealed through the interface of this character's voices. The glistening, dark presence of the rig is punctured by Youtube-culled footage of the rig's counter-character, Meat.