xero, kline & coma

xero, kline & coma is an artist run project space at 258 Hackney Road, London. It’s program, curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, focuses primarily on solo exhibitions by internationally established as well as emerging artists. Work by recent graduates King Conny Wobble and David Steans is being shown alongside projects like the Museum of American Art – Berlin, previously included in the Venice and Istanbul Biennales, Jeffrey Vallance, whose recent solo exhibition was at the Warhol Museum, and Plastique Fantastique, whose work has been shown at Tate Britain and the Pratt Manhatten Gallery, New York, with the aim of raising the profile of lesser known artists and allowing others to experiment with work that more institutional contexts don’t always permit. Some of the themes this program has explored have included fictional identities, a-chronological art histories and the mediation of ritual in time-based media. A commitment to critically engaged art is also central to the ethos of the space, and future shows include an exploration of unionism in art by Sophie Carapetian. As well as displaying new work, the gallery hosts events, talks and screenings. Most recently these have included meetings of the Political Currency of Art research group, a discussion and film screening dealing with the theme of ‘hostile objects’ led by Evan Calder Williams and Marina Vishmidt, a book launch for New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty by Antonio Negri and Felix Guattari and an event dedicated to the theatre work of Slovenian art collective NSK, featuring a screening of unreleased documentation and a discussion about the future of total performance.

The story of Temple Bar: creating Dublin's cultural quarter

The paper conceptualises and explores the links between cities, commerce, urbanism and cultural planning by drawing on Temple Bar in Dublin as an example of how, by linking these concepts to practice in real concrete situations urban life or urban culture can be created and/or revitalised. Temple Bar is Dublin's emerging cultural quarter, an experiment in urban revitalisation which is deliberately focused on culture and urbanism as ways of rediscovering the good city. It has attracted considerable interest from across Europe, and has secured EC funding to kick-start the process of renewal. The author was appointed by the Irish Government to prepare the area management and development strategy for Temple Bar in 1990. Wary of the dangers of property led regeneration, of the destructive impacts of sudden or cataclysmic change, the agencies in Temple Bar have deliberately adopted a strategic management approach to the area. This is referred to as 'urban stewardship', a process of looking after and respecting a place, and helping it to help itself. The paper explores whether there is a 'culture of cities' and whether it is possible to recreate an urban culture. Following Raymond Williams, an anthropological definition of culture is employed, "... a particular way of life, which expresses certain meaning and values not only in art and learning but also in institutional and ordinary behaviour". Rather than being simply an add-on to the serious concerns of economic development and the built environment, culture has both helped shape, and continues to develop in, the streets, spaces and buildings of the city.

No Haus Like Bau

The project consists of a live performance taking the 2005 IKEA riot as the starting point for a speculative history of a fictional future, culminating in a choreographed re-enactment of the original event. It is accompanied by a film series explores the possibility of collective action emerging from the capitalist relations inherent in the consumer riot. The performance, staged at the Berlin Biennale, continues this research into re-enactment and post-1989 politics, using a stage set made of flatpack furniture. Using the aesthetics of Modernism and the avant garde, the project transposes early twentieth century utopian ideology to a present day setting where mass uprisings are motivated by cheap commodities. By re-evaluating biomechanics and Bauhaus theatre theory, these explorations of consumerism and revolution propose that the mechanized movement developed in conjunction with industrial labour survives as a historical re-enactment in the wake of manufacturing work in the west. In the absence of a visual language apt to the contemporary, No Haus Like Bau uses re-enactment as a retrogarde tactic. Its purpose on the one hand is to invoke trajectories for alternate futures that never materialized at an originary moment. On the other hand, the clash of past forms with present content serves to accentuate the historical changes that have thrown into question these forms. Rather than reflecting the present, the projection of the past into a fictional future aims to destabilize the dominant narrative that suggests the current configuration of art, politics and human nature has always been this way. The project has been widely exhibited internationally and supported by Film London and Arts Council England. A theoretical essay on re-enactment as a strategy for performance has been published in Art Papers and in Memory [MIT]. The project also formed the basis of a solo exhibition at Te Tuhi Art Centre, Auckland.

Paraméricas Utópicas: entranced and transient nations in "I Am Cuba" (1964) and "Land in Anguish" (1967)

This article examines the astonishing similarities between two political films, Land in Trance (Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). Both address the subject of revolution through the enactment of trance. Both reject all forms of naturalistic account, adopting a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche, personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form, rather than its content. Because there is no evidence that Glauber Rocha had seen I Am Cuba before he shot Land in Trance, these coincidences are treated as an intellectual 'transit' between film-makers whose art was fuelled by cinephilia and the belief in the reality of the film medium.