Location: Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee

Screening to be presented at Studio Jamming, Cooper Gallery


“Is it possible to find a part of yourself that you did not know was lost? Is it possible to discover that you are someone other than who you think you are?” Robert Ashley, Part 3, Questions and Answers, Now Eleanor’s Idea, 1994-95

In thinking about collaboration as an act of assembly, brittleness and precarity, of performance and disappearance, as a constellation, an act of dispersal I also want to think about it through ideas of delay, attachment and abrasion. This short performance and screening taking the form of field notes from the work in progress Taking Counting Blinking Noting: 16mm film as a collaborative action touches on James N Hutchinson’s ideas around the ‘exhibition as object to object as exhibition’, the art object as a constellation, a thing for dispersal, Judith Butler’s Notes on a Performative Theory of Assembly especially her linking assembly to precarity and bodily vulnerabilities and Robert Ashley’s opera libretto on the plural and mutable forms an individual’s identity takes while Gusmao and Paiva's film sees camera and subject unify.


Extract from Now Eleanor’s Idea, Robert Ashley, Part 1 Change (1994-1995) from the CD recording Now Eleanor’s Idea, 2007

Reading from Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Wheels, 16mm transferred to digital, streaming, silent, 2 mins 37 seconds, 2011

Alex Hetherington, Anonymous Writes A Spell for the Camera/Michelle Hannah’s Arm/Marisa’s High, 2019, black and white film, 16mm print, 4 mins 57 seconds, 18fps attached to Alex Hetherington, Untitled (A Possible Spell for Surrounding), 2019, colour reversal film, 16mm print, 2 mins 56 seconds, 24fps, films are played together, both silent, extracts and titled camera tests from the film project Talking Counting Blinking Noting 16mm film as a collaborative action, funded by Creative Scotland’s Open Project awards.

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