Silver Sehnsucht

THE SILVER BUILDING, LONDON
30.09.2017 - 08.10.2017
Curated by Mara Kolmel, Silvana Lagos,
and Rafael Schacter

BRAD DOWNEY / CHRISTINE SUN KIM / CHRISTOPHER STEAD / HELENA HUNTER & MARK PETER WRIGHT

JAMES BRIDLE / JAZOO YANG / KHADIJA VON ZINNENBURG CARROLL / MARK SALVATUS

PAOLA TORRES NÚÑEZ DEL PRADO / POKLONG ANADING / ROSANA ANTOLI / WILLIAM MACKRELL

From Saturday 30th September to Sunday 8th October, a contemporary art takeover of the 50,000 square foot Silver Building in London’s Docklands will be the experimental B-side response to the annual Frieze Art Fair. Bringing together 12 artists from 6 countries, the free to the public exhibition Silver Sehnsucht will fill the poetically empty rooms of the building with a multi-sensorial, immersive experience of sound, video, installation, performance and events, weeks before the Brutalist block is transformed into a working space for artists and makers in a project being undertaken by Nick Hartwright and the GLA. The exhibition is set at a provocative time: the post-industrial spaces that surround the Silver Building are on the verge of a major transformation, an impending regeneration that strikes at the heart of the idea behind Silver Sehnsucht: 

Against the impressive backdrop view of London’s Docklands and the River Thames, Rosana Antoli’s site-specific installation made from rubber hose pervades the space like a pulsating drawing in three-dimensional space. The specter of the rubber producing industrialist S.W. Silver, whom Silvertown is named after, also haunts the immersive installation by the collective Matterlurgy. Their installation reassembles industrial materials from the surrounding area to construct a speculative landscape that foregrounds present day geopolitics and industrial histories.  

The colonial history of Silvertown is equally taken up by Peruvian artist Paola Torres Núñez Del Prado. In her participatory sound installation, hand-made textiles become a powerful emblem exploring gentrification as a softer version of colonialization. Poklong Anading’s work, a series of painted plastic bags whose gold paint will slowly flake and fragment during the period of the exhibition, exposes both the ephemerality of the material realm as much as the vulnerability of capital. The shimmering sensations induced by Anading’s installation reappear in the seductive video collage by artist William Mackrell. Reverberating in the backdrop view of Canary Wharf’s constellation of financial power, his work amplifies the all-consuming desires and illusions of capitalism that drives the body to inescapable exhaustion. Likewise, the American artist Christine Sun Kim, who has been deaf since birth, exposes the way that past actions are molded and altered through processes of translation, be that of a literal or metaphoric kind.

As a whole, however, all the artists within Silver Sehnsucht aim to interrogate a particular feeling of ambivalence, to uncover the fragments of past actions, the residues of present longing, and the dizzily flickering futures that exist within all spaces and times.

For the Silver Sehnsucht pamphlet, please click here.

For the Silver Sehnsucht short films directed by Jhenfy Muller, please see below.

*Private View on the 29th of September presented by NTS RADIO, further event highlights include a panel discussion with EYESORE Magazine and performance programme with Rosana Antoli & Matterlurgy hosted by The Line and Frieze VIP.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF Peter Calivn @Mr.plala

Main Exhibition Text

Sometimes you can be nostalgic for what is yet to come. That strange feeling of longing for a future as yet unknown, that melancholic pining for the possible.

Sometimes a space can do this, a space laden with time, a space filled with the past that is moving fast towards a future. A space inhabiting multiple temporalities, multiple tenses. 

Silver Sehnsucht aims to interrogate this particular feeling of ambivalence, to uncover the fragments of past actions, the residues of present longing, and the dizzily flickering futures that exist within all spaces and all times.

Focussing in particular on the district of Silvertown in which the exhibition is situated, a space stranded somewhere between the colonial forces of Britain’s past (the home of the eponymous S.W.Silver and Co Rubber Works but so too of the East India Company and Tate & Lyle) and the shiny financial power of it’s present (of Canary Wharf and the site formerly known as the Millennium Dome), the post-industrial spaces which surround The Silver Building are currently on the verge of a major transformation, an impending regeneration project which strikes right at the heart of the eponymous Sehnsucht of our title.

That explains the Silver, but what is this Sehnsucht? Much like the Portuguese expression saudade, the German term Sehnsucht is a word famously difficult to translate into English. Often simply rendered as nostalgia, Sehnsucht, in fact, moves far from the historically directed leaning of its English translation. Working through prospection and evaluation as much as retrospection, encompassing sensibilities for past, present, and future simultaneously, Sehnsucht can be understood to emphasise an affirmative yearning toward the possible rather than a stale turn to the past. It can thus be grasped as a term which acts to stimulate and galvanise progress, bringing together what is gained and lost, what is present and absent, even whilst functioning within a fundamentally ambivalent modality.

Bringing together artists working across sound, performance, video, and installation, Silver Sehnsucht will thus critically reflect on both the strange merging of temporalities that the term connotes as well as the ways these are reflected in the location of Silvertown itself. It will explore the bittersweet feeling which emerges from the increasing speed of contemporary world, the feeling of loss for something unknown in the anxious process of ushering in something new.

The Silver Building

Exhibition Design (by Mauro Bonillo)

Brad Downey

The Censorship Project, 2017
Six found vintage cinema posters, marker, paint, framed
68cm x 100cm (each, unframed)
Samsung E8000GF TV (hacked model)
Video (loop). Recomposed, officially censored found footage.
Courtesy of the artist and Cuadro Gallery, Dubai

Downey’s installation, a set of found Turkish cinema posters which have each been officially (yet differently) censored, and a recomposed video of digitally sanitized Olympic footage, plays upon the idea of both longing and intentionality. Whilst the different levels of censorship allude to the contrasting value systems of those manually censoring the works, it is within the flaws in the algorithm, the differentials of deletion, that Downey finds the feeling of Sehnsucht. Playing his recomposed film on a Samsung TV hacked by the CIA (according to WikiLeaks), a form of divine censorship for the motherland rather than God, Downey thus plays on the line between vandalism and protection, a visual analysis of good and bad taste, of acceptability and propriety. 

Christian Jankowski

Telemistica, 1999
Television broadcast and colour DVD
21:55 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

In modest Italian, Christian Jankowski phones five Italian TV fortune tellers to obtain predictions for his future and foretell the success of his participation in the 48th Biennale in Venice. The conversations are recorded live and later exhibited as his contribution to the exhibition in question. Moving along the threshold of comedic awkwardness and charming wit, the artist not only exposes his ambivalent desire for certainty in his making process but also creates parallels between the twisted longing to foresee the future fulfilled by fortune tellers and the future-oriented speculations of the art world. It is thus perhaps not surprising that Telemistica contributed fundamentally to the artist’s international breakthrough, turning the largely positive responses by the fortune-tellers into a self-fulfilling prophecy

Christine Sun Kim

Close Readings, 2015
4-channel video, 25:53 min
Courtesy the artist and Carroll / Fletcher, London, UK
Close Readings captioners, left to right: Jeffrey Mansfield, Ariel Baker-Gibbs, Alison O’Daniel, Lauren Ridloff

Close Readings, a compilation of film clips selected by Kim, undertakes the task of captioning the resonance and multidimensionality of sound rather than simply that of the voice as traditionally transcribed. Entrusting 4 ‘captioners’ with various degrees of deafness to interpret the chosen scenes and add their own cues, Close Readings explores the experience of watching a film for non-hearing audiences: it exposes the dependence on what the captioner wishes to reference or leave out, the multiple layering of sound reduced to a simple inscription. Ranging from literal to conceptual, the sound descriptions in Kim’s work take on both imagined or even poetic qualities as the four interpretations of the clips play in unison

Christopher Stead

Heterotopic Tourist, 2017
Resin, fence, rope, iron, Wood, shredded canvas
250 x 174 cm (each)
Courtesy of the artist

Oscillating between sculpture and painting, Heterotopic Tourist aims to dissolve the boundaries between fetish and use value, vernacular craft and ‘high-art’. Set around the motif of the fence, an image representing life in all its dichotomous glory (depending on which side you sit on), the work acts as a visual reference to the philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of Heterotopia, a discourse on the notion of utopia and dystopia, on the liminal spaces parallel to normative society. These spaces, such as, one could argue, The Silver Building itself, occupy a space on the fence, between bounds, out of bounds. They thus provide both possibility and danger in one moment, the simultaneous precarity and promise of spaces outside the everyday.

James Bridle

Gradient Ascent, 2017
Single channel digital video
12:00 minutes (loop)
Courtesy of the artist

The film Gradient Ascent follows a self-driving car, built by Bridle himself, as it travels up Mount Parnassus in Greece, the classical home of the Muses and of art and knowledge. The journey is accompanied by a narrative on mythology and technological progress inspired by René Daumal’s surrealist novel Mount Analogue (1952). Exploring the power of myth and technology in shaping knowledge and movement, Bridle reinstitutes the mythical presence of Mount Parnassus in the domain of the machine as a way to humanise computer science. Myth and technology grow out of multifaceted terrain and there are many routes to the summit of the mountain: The first step depends on the last or, as Aldous Huxley put it, means determine ends.

Jazoo Yang

Specimens of the Street [Materials series], 2017
Solvent free epoxy paints, found objects, paper, wood panel
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

Yang’s Specimens of the Street [Materials series] are an amalgamation of the diverse, the distant, and the disregarded. Formed of the lost fragments of urban life that Yang rescues before their inevitable disappearance – remnants of a buildings’ outer walls, scraps of wallpaper from an interior, the remains of antique tiles – these often silent, ignored objects are here magnified from the mundane, framed to acknowledge the immensity of the intimate. Yet what we see in Yang’s works could easily have been taken from the space in which they hang. The chipped surfaces of The Silver Building will soon be smoothed and glossed over, removing any trace of its current state of decay. Yang’s works, however, show how the past, present and future are fused in the very materiality of these walls.

Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll

Embassy Embassy, 2017
Video, 2-channel sound installation, paper, mixed media
Dimensions variable  
3:33 minutes (loop)
Courtesy of the artist

Exploring forms of representation and national identity, Embassy Embassy is an installation and video work drawing on the sites and archives of the former Iraq and Australia embassies in East Berlin. In what remains of these two, architecturally identical edifices, are also the mirrors of exiled identities beyond this off-site embassy installation. It is the space of those that are detained indeterminately because of the trappings of national ideologies. The terror of trespass into the original GDR sites and attempted assassination within the Iraq embassy is narrated in two channels of sound. This is the office of every ambassador after their power is fractured, the broken circle.  

Mark Salvatus

Notes from the New World, 2015

2-channel video projection, HDV colour, sound
12:00 minutes (loop)
Courtesy of the artist and 1335Mabini, Manila, Philippines

Referencing global history, popular culture, and period nostalgia, Savlatus’s Notes from the New World aims to create a new historical narrative through overlapping different eras of the past. Inspired by his father’s collection of vinyl records, Salvatus reawakens the presence of The Philippine Army Band: Formed during the Philippine American War in 1901 by William Loving, an African-American army officer, the Army Band were famously invited to play Rossini’s William Tell Overture at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the same exhibit in which living Filipinos ‘natives’ were also ‘displayed’. Equally referencing Ferdinand Marcos’s New Society regime, during which almost all of these records were produced, Salvatus reworks these various historical residues into a single holistic piece, bringing the past into immediate contact with the present.

Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter & Mark Peter Wright)

Beneath the Signal and Noise, 2017
Mixed Media
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists

Matterlurgy’s site-specific installation materializes some of the pasts-present and present-futures of Silvertown. The work is haunted by the specter of Samuel Winkworth Silver, the industrial capitalist whom Silvertown is named after: Silver made much of his wealth from Gutta-percha, a tree from Southeast Asia that produces a naturally occurring latex, which was used to insulate underwater telegraph cables during the 19th Century (today often used as internet cables). The installation reassembles industrial materials from the surrounding area to construct a speculative landscape that foregrounds networked ecologies of environmental change, present day geopolitics and industrial histories.

Paola Torres Nunez Del Torres

The Lost Code (Corrupted Data), 2017
Arduino, conductive and non-conductive threads, sound card
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

The Lost Code (Corrupted Data), explores the notion of loss in reference to the socioeconomic processes visible in the immediate landscape of Silvertown. The works, three hand-made textiles woven in the traditional Andean technique of brocade but with the strands disjointed and unthreaded, visibly disturbed and destructured, delicately references community bonds, progressively cut and replaced. Here, Torres Núñez Del Prado's positions the process of gentrification as a softer form of colonialization, one that robs a community of its riches and vibrancy. The three textiles lie dormant – until they are touched and interacted with by their visitors however, their conductive thread turning them into a social instrument.

Poklong Anading

Without With, 2017
Plastic bags, aerosol paint, industrial fans
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and 1335Mabini, Manila, Philippines

Without With is a study of the migration of desire from one form to another. Collecting discarded plastic bags from the street and coating them with gold paint, these amalgamated artefacts are then attached to a set of industrial electrical fans: Not only inflating and distending the bags however, the continuous blast of air causes the thin layer of gold to slowly crack, flake and dissipate into the ether (as it will during the period of the exhibition). Striping away the veneer of riches to reveal the base matter that constitutes it, Without With thus investigates the temporality of desire that flows like the proverbial dust in the wind, an alchemical fusion of plastic and gold that form a poetic dialogue between the base and the luxurious, detritus and the pure.

Rosana Antoli

Chaos Dancing Cosmos, 2016 - 2017
Rubber tubes, motors, spotlights
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Chaos Dancing Cosmos pervades the space like a pulsating drawing in three-dimensions. Small motors bestow movement upon the static rubber-tubing creating an interplay of material friction and resistance. Antoli’s continuously changing constellation alludes to a similar historical one. S.W. Silver’s India-Rubber, Gutta-Percha & Telegraph Works, a firm deeply entwined with the complex imperial and colonial network of Victorian Britain, opened in 1852 along the river front adjacent to The Silver Building. Antoli interweaves this thread of Silvertown’s history tied to the exploitation of people and natural resources into a cosmos of relations, that places us in the rhythmic eddying of past, present and future possibilities.

William Makrell

Breaking a Dance, 2016
6:56 minutes
HD Video Projection
Courtesy the artist

Breaking a Line (Silver Sehnsucht), 2017
Site specific installation, Fluorescent light fixtures
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

Mackrell’s works hold an anxious and uneasy sense of place, as they try to maintain their existence under the continuous threat of their own absence. His first piece, Breaking a Dance centres on the artist’s desperate attempt to perform a dance under the colossal weight of hundreds of penny coins glued over the entirety of his costume. The dazzling and mesmerising imagery is flooded by sounds reminiscent of a winning slot machine. The dizzy and shimmering sensations induced by the video reverberate in the backdrop view of Canary Wharf’s confederation of financial power. This seductive collage amplifies the all-consuming desires and illusions of capitalism that drive the body to inescapable exhaustion. The flickering colours of the video reappear in the faulty flashing and groaning fluorescent lights of Breaking a Line, Mackrell’s second piece. Salvaging these gleaming tubes from industrial units and artist studios across London, the lights act as emblems of a wider global disappearance of artist workspaces, alluding too to the Silver Building’s temporality. Oscillating between complete collapse and the possibility of future presence, the installation translates the exhibition’s theme into a powerful singular image.

Filippo Minelli (special guest appearance)

Opening Night with NTS /
Tour with Frieze VIP and The Line

PRESS