SPAIN

DAVID FERRANDOGIRAUT
LABoral Centro de Arte yCreación Industrial, Gijón‘In the end, there is no control of theunconstitutionality or irrationality of thelaw beyond the ballot boxes or social
movements’, says a voice-over at the startof Speech Prosthesis (an AlchemicalConversation) (2014), the latest work by
Spanish artist David Ferrando Giraut, which
was staged as a solo show at LABoral. The
four-channel video installation explores
how irrationality, triggered by greed and fear,runs rife in current processes of politicaldecision-making. Ferrando Giraut’s ‘casestudy’ is the Spanish government’s controversial revision of the energy laws last year,
which resulted in penalizing the renewableenergies sector, whereas only a year earlier
it had been incentivized.
Ferrando Giraut’s immersive work wasshaped as a conversation between the four
natural elements – wind, water, earth and fire
– which assumed several guises across thedifferent components of the installation: asvoices, as colours, as objects and as sounds.
Each channel of the video featured a specificbackground colour (yellow, blue, green or red)and two digitally animated, rotating objects,
each signifying the ways in which humanbeings have harnessed these natural elements throughout history. Earth, for example,
was represented by three prehistoric stones
and a hydraulic hammer; water by a Greek
amphora and a water cooler. Wind took theform of bellows and an artificial-respiration
machine. Finally, fire was embodied by atinderbox and a camping stove. The use ofthis genealogical set of objects is a recurrent
strategy in the recent work of the Londonbased artist, one that allows him to impress
upon the viewer the sense of a historicalcontinuum, which he sees as having been
supplanted by the rhetoric of rupture,of relentless ‘life-changing technologicalrevolutions.
In front of the panoramic widescreen
projection at LABoral, four speakers, in thetriangular forms of the alchemical symbols

GREECEof the four elements, were placed on top ofmetallic poles. The speakers were positioned ina square formation, creating a space that you
had to enter in order to hear the different partsof the quadraphonic soundtrack. The audio
featured fragments from interviews that
Ferrando Giraut had conducted with a localgroup of experts, including an environmental
activist, a lawyer, an economist, a geologist,a climate-change specialist and a philosopherof science. In a clear nod to Bruno Latour’sconcept of the ‘Parliament of Things’ – a rejection of Modernity’s dualistic distinction
between nature and society, which was firstmentioned in his oft-quoted book We Have
Never Been Modern (1991) – the artist
employed the experts’ testimonies as if to givea voice to the objects. These voice-overs
offered varied insights into the energy problem
in Spain, emphasizing not only the political andeconomic motivations behind the recent revision of government energy legislation, but also
the impact that traditional methods of energy
extraction are having on the environment.
Despite the local nature of its source
material, Speech Prosthesis tackles universal
issues, particularly the widely discussed
question of whether to endorse ‘Anthropocene’,a recently popularized term coined to designatea new geological era marked by the deeptransformations caused by humankind. But
it is the work’s critique of the irrationalismof much contemporary politics – expressed
mainly through the experts’ voice-overs – thatmakes this piece so timely.
While it clearly belongs to the tradition ofresearch-based art, Speech Prosthesis doesn’t
avoid formal experimentation. Crucially, anddespite the seriousness of its claims, it’sa sensuous and enthralling work. The objects
mentioned above rotate mid-air on the screens
for the duration of the piece (24 minutes)
and the voices – carefully treated with soundeffects that evoke the four elements – become
haunting cyphers for our mistreated ecosystem:
they’re like voices of conscience that stubbornly emerge from near-obliteration. Ferrando
Giraut’s installation is not just an illustrationof a critical creed or a documentary-stylepiece about a political situation, it endeavours
to tell us about something we might alreadyknow, but in a way that we’ve never been told
it before.
LORENA MUÑOZ-ALON SO

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THIS IS NOT MYBEAUTIFUL HOUSE
Kunsthalle Athena
Rarely has a show been so aptly titled.
In a magnificent wreck of a building, in amagnificent wreck of a city, the non-profit art
space Kunsthalle Athena hosted the show
‘This Is not my Beautiful House’. The line isfrom the Talking Heads’ track, ‘Once in a
Lifetime’ (1981), which is one of the few pop
songs that manages to be as uplifting as itis bleak. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that it
also includes the words: ‘into the blue again,
after the money’s gone’, which pretty muchdescribes the situation the Greek capitalhas found itself in after years of crippling
economic crisis. There may be no governmentfunding in Athens right now but, thanks toa rare mix of philanthropy, private initiativeand cheap rent, the art scene is, on manylevels, thriving.
The Kuntshalle Athena was set up in2010 by the dynamic curator and writer (andoccasional frieze contributor) Marina Fokidis,
in a semi-derelict 19th-century building in
Metaxourgeio, a once-affluent neighbourhoodof Athens that fell on hard times and is now
experiencing the first buds of gentrification(The Breeder and Rebecca Camhi Gallery
are also in the area). The Kunsthalle – whichis run by volunteers, survives on donations
and hosts a lively talks programme as well
as exhibitions – states that it wishes to learn‘through the experiences and insights of others’ and ‘through mistakes – not least its own’.
It’s also wonderfully self-reliant: in a country
battered with gloom and humiliation, thegallery declares that it ‘will be what we makeof it for as long as we want to make it’.
Sensitively curated by Klea Charitou,
Marina Fokidis, Eleanna Papathanasiadi
and Apostolos Vassilopoulos, ‘This Is not myBeautiful House’ included the work offour Greek artists, Anastasia Ax, Apostolos
Georgiou, Socratis Socratous and Kostis
Velonis. Meaning emerged through a mix ofsuggestion and imagination via installation,
photography, sculpture and painting, all ofwhich inhabited different rooms in this deeply
atmospheric mansion with a sense of both
possibility and despair. Dislocation was theF R I E Z E NO. 1 6 7

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REVIEWS

AUSTRALIA

order of the day; remnants from previous
shows haunted the once-grand rooms likewelcome ghosts taking stock of the present.
Ax’s installation, Exile (2014), evoked a sortof 21st century Pompeii. Large, whitewashedtriangular shapes, some collapsed, someloosely strung together, filled the space. Thework seemed to be in a state of flux; it had
been smashed up, walked over and thencategorized by an archaeologist, the resultsof which were displayed in a vitrine. Ax seems
to be asking: ‘How we do make sense ofhistory as we are living it?’Georgiou’s large untitled painting from2012 depicts a man and a woman falling overtwo chairs, their faces obscured. Are they
fighting, having fun, drunk? Who knows? Butthen, what do we ever know of other people’s
motivations, despite the fact that we’re all thesame species? What I do know is that thispowerfully ambiguous painting, rendered in
the artist’s trademark dusty lilac, brown andeucalyptus-green palette, stayed with melong after I had left the gallery.
Gardens – sites of solace – often feature
in Socratous’s finely wrought sculptures. For
Stolen Garden (2014) he cast branches, leaves,flowers and fruit from the National Garden ofAthens in bronze: some are national symbolsof Greece, while others are weeds. Delicate,despite the toughness of their materials, thesemelancholy objects seemed to have grownthrough the ancient floorboards and been rendered immobile at their moment of flowering.
Fascinated by ‘failed builders’, Avant-gardetheatre and working class history, Velonis’s
sculptures combine both personal and historical references. Tribune Leading to the Rampand Ramp Leading to the Tribune (2014) is an
enigmatic Minimalist structure that evokes
both stairs and anvils; it was paired with ablack and white photograph of a man slumped
on a wall next to an empty pram. It’s a desolate,mysterious pairing; a private moment juxtaposed with a Modernist shape. A deceptively
simple video by Velonis from 2010 was also
on show: it’s a single shot of a photograph ofclassical ruins attached to a wall with a bulldog clip, fluttering in the breeze. Titled How
One Can Think Freely in the Shadow of aTemple, it’s a question as a statement of fact,
and one that is still as achingly relevant – inthe words of Talking Heads – as it ever was.
JE NNIFER HIGGIE

1David Ferrando Giraut
Speech Prosthesis (An Alchemical Conversation),
2014, installation view at LABoral Centro deArte y Creación Industrial
2Foreground: Socratis Socratous
Stolen Garden, 2014; background: Anastasia
Ax, EXILE, 2014, installation view
3

Ash Kilmartin
OHN, 2014, neon sign operated by resident
studio artists

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NOVEMBER • DECEMBER 2014

OCTOPUS 14:NOTHING BESIDEREMAINS
Gertrude Contemporary,Melbourne
Gertrude Contemporary has a special placein the hearts of the many who have passed
through its doors. Since its inception in
1985, the gallery, project space and studiocomplex has fostered and supported
artists, curators, independent publishers,
writers and academics. For Melbourne’s arts
community, it’s the next step up from therich array of artist-run initiatives for which
the city has become known.
Gertrude Contemporary originallyoccupied a former home-ware factory andemporium, Johnston’s, which opened in
1889. The model for the gallery was New
York’s PS1, which repurposed a school as
artists’ studios and exhibition spaces. But
Gertrude is now at the next stage of its
institutional career. Though well fundedby state and federal government, thegentrification of the surrounding innercity suburb of Fitzroy has caused rents
to soar and Gertrude must now findanother home.
Gertrude’s history is the focus of the14th edition of its annual ‘Octopus’ exhibition,
for which it invites a curator to develop
an idea for a show. Tara McDowell, whorecently arrived in Melbourne as theinaugural associate professor and directorof the Curatorial Practice PhD programme
at Monash University Art Design andArchitecture (MADA), curated ‘Nothing
Beside Remains’.
One of McDowell’s innovations wasto stage the exhibition throughout Gertrude
Contemporary’s rabbit-warren of corridors,
storage spaces, stair-wells and staircases,
as well as in the gallery. Visitors accessed
the show through the usually private studioentrance, walked up a steep flight of stairs
and then percolated throughout thebuilding. Artists Saskia Schut and Scott
Mitchell programmed a series of readings
by local writers, publishers and designers,
which took place in the gallery’s shop-front
entrance. That McDowell is a newcomer
to Melbourne led her to examine the tracesof the gallery’s history that many locals
have, perhaps, overlooked simply because
they are so familiar.
The histories revealed by the exhibition
have curiously universal echoes. Lining
the entrance stairway was an untitled seriesof photographs from 2010–12 by Georgianartist Otar Karalashvili, which document
the hand-made notes that people looking
for work attach to Tbilisi’s buildings andstreet lamps. Other pieces in the show
also explored forms of labour. Allan Sekula’s
Untitled Slide Sequence (1972/2011) isa series of 1970s black and white slidesof employees ending their shift in an aerospace factory, while Harun Farocki’sfilm Workers Leaving the Factory (1995)
interweaves footage from the first film by
the Lumière brothers with other clips ofworkers exiting factory gates.

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A number of past and present
Gertrude artists engaged directly with thebuilding’s inhabitants. At the top of thestairs, Agatha Gothe-Snape created a cosy
den with comfortable chair, reading lightand crocheted rug, where she and gallery
invigilators read from texts that former
studio artists nominated as having been
influential during their residencies (AnUncertain Reader, 2014). Ash Kilmartin’s
neon sign spells out OHN (2014) – the only
remaining letters of the building’s originalsign. It was illuminated as the last studioartist to leave the building turned it on,
and then turned off by the first to arrive
the next day.
Other works also drew attention to
the fabric of the building. Nicholas Mangan’s
A Division of time that neither begins norends here … (2014) is the finest of geological cores, drilled from the gallery andstudios’ timber-and-masonite surfaces,and presented in a glass-fronted display
case embedded into a corridor wall.
Zarouhie Abdalian’s Simple Machines (2014),
a series of small black lacquered wooden
wedges, were placed on the floor, in ceiling
cavities and in other unexpected spaces.
Susan Jacobs re-assembled the vast
conveyor belt that had lain untouched instorage at the rear of the building in thedownstairs gallery: Conveyor (George Watts
is a traitor) (2014) was a monument toredundant industry.
The exhibition’s apt title, ‘Nothing BesideRemains’, is a quote from Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (1817), an ode
to the ravages of time. Gertrude Contemporary
will move to a new, as yet undecided,
venue in 2016, in a location that hopefully is
not too far from its original roots.
R EB ECC A COAT E S