Fernanda Lago 10 Out of Almost 3

From Fire to Fire and into the Future

Brazilian artist Fernanda Lago has just completed an impressive show, '10 Out of Almost Three',  at sp.armazém, an alternative space owned by Clara Moraes and Tom Chambel, located in a thriving district of São Paulo, surrounded by galleries, restaurants, bars, coffee shops and stylish retail. I wrote a text to accompany the exhibition, which I reproduce here, together with photographs taken in the space during the run.

Fernanda Lago, Smiles, photographs mounted on wood, 100 x 7 x 2 cm

Journeys are usually conceived as something fixed, whether in time or place. They can denote a physical movement from one place to another, or a metaphorical one constructed through emotional experience. They have a beginning and an end. In reality, the journey exists before its putative start and continues afterwards, leaving the questions, when did we become aware of something beginning, and when did we decide that it had ended? In 10 Out of Almost 3 Fernanda Lago presents the journey of a relationship, at once experiential, psychological and temporal. It is, in its primary sense, the personal story of a period in her life that is still raw in its affect. Because she is an artist, and so the journey is presented through art, the work also speaks to universal experiences and feelings that will find echoes and recognition in the responses of all viewers. In that sense, 10 Out of Almost 3 represents something cyclical. A journey whose timings and specificities are constantly redefined, but whose general mythos already existed and continues without end.

Fernanda Lago, Fire, painted wood, lamp and vinyl, 30 x 20 x 12 cm

    The exhibition consists of an installation that is complete in itself, but which also has clearly defined elements signifying different stages in the journey of the artist’s life that could also arguably be viewed as distinct works. The first elements viewers encounter speak to powerful emotions that are positive and, significantly unquestioning. Smiles consists of a series of six close-up photographs of the artist’s mouth that track the unfolding of an expression familiar to us all. The smile, of course, denotes happiness. Yet even here, because viewers are unable to see any other facial features, there are perhaps seeds of a less positive denouement – is that a broad smile in the final image, or a tearful grimace? Fire is, if anything, even more equivocal in its signification. We commonly talk of the ‘fire of love’, meaning that period at the beginning of a relationship when each protagonist gives themselves to the other unquestioningly and without judgement, and when the rest of the world seems far away and unimportant. Fires, of course, inevitably cool and the material from which they drew their power is irrevocably consumed and altered. Similarly, the metaphor of fire, when describing first love, contains within it always already the sense of an end. Consisting of a small black box containing a lamp that mimics flames, and a dictionary description of fire – ‘A phenomenon consisting in the release of heat and light produced by the combustion of a body’ – Fire is conceptual art memory of a particular moment and state that is no longer accessible directly and can only be alluded to.

Fernanda Lago, (left) Impression of a Being, acrylic print, 30 x 30 cm, (right) Description of a Being, painted wood and fabric printing, 30 x 30 x 4 cm

    The appearance of a third party in the relationship in the form of a child is one common strand in relationship narratives. In this instance the child looms large as a loved being, symbolised through two works, Impression of a Being and Description of a Being, which emphasise the reality of this new entity born of the relationship between the couple, in turn as incipient and manifest personhood.

Fernanda Lago, Labyrinth #1 and #2, painted wood, vinyl transparency, photograph, 27 x 36 x 5 cm

That the pregnancy was not without its challenges, however, is powerfully communicated in two self-portrait photographs overlaid with drawing. The geometric drawn shapes, in turn a large spiral and a teetering spinning top, contrast with the still solidity of the human figure. In this way inner and outer states are suggested, speaking to the dizziness and inner ear problems that were a feature of the pregnancy.

Fernanda Lago, Origin, umbilical chord, resin, jewellery box, metal, perspex

A third element in this suite, Origin consists of an umbilical cord contained in a box within a box. This can be read as the symbolic giver of life and the thing that connects mother and son forever. The cord’s separation from both mother and child occurs at the moment of separation of the two and the true individuation of the child. In that sense Origin is suggestive of some precious reliquary containing a once-powerful object now put away for safekeeping.

Fernanda Lago, No Empathy, No Love, print acrylic, 53 x 14 cm

    If the birth of a child might be characterized as part of the ascent of the relationship, the subsequent three works belong to its descent. No Empathy, No Love is a rebus offering an elementary sum that adds up to nothing. It is heartbreaking in its simplicity and emotional emptiness – the very image of psychological withdrawal.

Fernanda Lago, Remains of an End, Five framed photographs, each 21 x 15 x 3 cm

Blank existential confusion is the dominant feel of Lost in my Had, which speaks in the language of the sketch and thus suggests something unfinished, and perhaps something that will never be (satisfactorily) concluded. In contrast, the five photographs consisting Remains of an End already indicate a state of reflection. Utilising a cool vernacular documentary style, reminiscent of the lost Polaroids to which they allude, each image contains an object whose traditional symbolism has been undermined or inverted. In that sense Remains of an End is at once a song of innocence and experience.

Fernanda Lago, Resurrection of the Phoenix, watercolour and fabric, 150 x 220 cm

    Reflection can result in a destructive spiralling inward and down, or in a release of sorts. The final element in the installation, Resurrection of the Phoenix is the most unformed image. Derived from a watercolour painting the colour of a half-cleaned, dried bloodstain, and placed behind a veil, this work nevertheless speaks to a suggestive optimism. The thrust of this simple form is upwards and outwards. It somehow contains hope for the future.

Fernanda Lago, installation view of 10 Out of Almost 3

    If this short description speaks to the intentional narrative direction of 10 Out of Almost 3, it is worth remembering that as viewers each of us is at liberty to engage in whichever order we desire. In any case, each journey within the gallery space will be differently constructed. The only things for sure are that we will enter Fernanda Lago’s world of 10 Out of Almost 3 and, at some moment, we will leave it. I would like to think that this ‘final’ act of leaving the gallery constitutes the last conceptual element in the installation, since it always already signifies the existence of the future and the multiple possibilities of the journey continuing.

10 Out of Almost 3 was at sp.armazém, Rua Alvaro Anes 154, Pinheiros, São Paulo, Brazil, 26 January - 13 February 2022

All photos courtesy Estudio EmObra

Four Artists in Rotterdam

In and Out of the Frame

Galerie Atelier Herenplaats, Schietbaanstraat 1, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Colin Rhodes

Last Friday saw the opening of In and Out of the Frame at Rotterdam's Galerie Atelier Herenplaats. Including more than 60 works by four artists, Anuja Hoogstad, Tim Soekkha, Richard Bennaars and myself. It was the first exhibition opening at the gallery since the beginning of the covid pandemic in The Netherlands, giving the event an added poignancy. It was great to see people turning out on the night to see the art and to mix with real people, as opposed to the eternal computer screen meetings we have all had to become used to (why do they call them 'virtual'? I see only necessity, not virtue). Of course, art that is made by hand and exists in physical form must be seen in real time and space. So, it was doubly pleasing for me to see the work of all four of us together in the gallery and viewers interacting with it. Online exhibitions are in no way a replacement for this; they are shadows, mere approximations that are not to be mistaken for the real thing. The online exhibition alone belongs in the dystopian descriptions of Debord and Baudrillard.

Anuja Hoogstad

In any case, these are all intimate works. Every artist here has poured themselves into the process of making and the resulting works are revelations of the psychologies and moods of each. In opening up in this way, they are trusting viewers to engage not objectively, by empathetically. This is as true of the sometimes dense, sometime tentative abstract mark-making of Richard Bennaars' paintings as it is of the precise, cool pen work of Anuja Hoogstrad, which operates through symbolic juxtaposition and gentle pareidolia. Tim Soekkha's drawings arise directly out of the experience of the way 2020 has thrown everyone back into an interior of sorts. They embody a crashing together of real experience and absurd encounter. I'll leave others to describe my work, except to say that everything here arises out of the cognitive process that only exists when mind, senses and physical movement trust to the demands of the materials of visual art.

Richard Bennaars and Colin Rhodes

The gallery card announcing the show can be seen in my previous post from 28 August, including information about artists and the concept

https://www.artschooltoartworld.com/2020/08/in-and-out-of-frame.html

Here are some installation photographs I made in the gallery, showing work by all of us. The exhibition can be seen until 14 November

Anuja Hoogstad

Tim Soekkha

Richard Bennaars

Colin Rhodes

In and Out of the Frame

Exhibition Announcement

In and Out of the Frame, Galerie Atelier Herenplaats

4 September - 14 November 2020

Very excited to announce that I am included in the forthcoming exhibition, In and Out of the Frame at Galerie Atelier Herenplaats, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This is a four-person show, including artists Anuja Hoogstad, Tim Soekkha, Richard Bennaars and myself. I have more than 20 works in the show, all available for sale. Please contact the gallery for details.

Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind Notes on an Exhibition Part 3

As a major new exhibition of work by Roger Ballen opens at the Halle St Pierre Museum in Paris I explore the genesis and realisation of the show I curated in Sydney in 2016

The Theatre of Darkness

The exhibition, Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind was held in the SCA Galleries at the University of Sydney, Australia from 16 March to 7 May, 2016. It was timed to coincide with the 20th Biennale of Sydney and was a featured exhibition in the 2016 Sydney Head On Photo Festival. It consisted of a themed exhibition of 75 photographs spanning Ballen’s career from 1999 to 2015 and a site-specific art installation, "Theatre of Darkness." In Parts 1 and 2 I gave an account of the genesis of the exhibition and the curation and hanging process of the main galleries show see . In this part I will consider the artist's creation of the "Theatre of Darkness" in another part of the SCA campus.

Roger Ballen and Marguerite Rossouw drawing on lab coats for use in the
"Theatre of Darkness", Sydney, 13 March 2016

The amazing spaces of the old Rozelle Hospital whose core buildings were designed by the American architect Charles Kirkbride provided inspiration for contemporary artists before the complex became the new campus for Sydney College of the Arts in 1996. Indeed, a number of art-inclined patients produced work during their stays in its hospital days. That said, at least one ex-patient told me that art making was frowned upon when he was there. It was an activity that had to be pursued in secret. He told me of surreptitiously tearing pages out of books in the hospital library to draw on and stealing pens from the nurses. I have seen some of the drawings he made there, which remain in his possession. Generations of art students have taken advantage of the suggestive spaces, both above ground, but also sometimes below. There are, for example, amazing, huge copper tanks below the lawns that were built to provide a clean water supply to the hospital. Now almost impossible to access because of health and safety restrictions, in the early days of SCA's occupation of this location not a few art projects utilised this marvellous subterranean and subaqueous structure. The other famous underground space is a series of vaulted tunnels colloquially referred to as  'The Dungeons.' This was to be the location of the final section of the exhibition, Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind - the "Theatre of Darkness".

Staircase to ground level from the underground spaces

According to legend, the 'dungeons' were originally the location of the entrance of a tunnel that led to this end of Sydney Harbour. In the nineteenth century a public ordnance decreed that the insane could not be transported on the Queen's highway, and so movement of patients had to be by boat. No tunnel can be accessed today, but there is some visual evidence of where the entrance might have been. More lurid tales tell of them as the place where people with what nineteenth-century medicine might call raving madness were contained. Doctors who worked in the Kirkbride buildings insist that 'dungeons' is a misnomer and that no people were ever detained in those spaces; indeed that they were built merely to serve as store rooms. Ex-patients that I have spoke to disagree. So do ex-nurses who were employed there in the 1950s. They spoke of disturbing sounds coming from these spaces, which were, moreover locked and out of bounds. Whatever the truth of their history and purpose, they are certainly eerie and and uncanny. They don't feel like food stores. No wonder that their most frequent uses since the hospital vacated have been as a setting for scenes in horror movies and venue for Halloween parties. A perfect location, therefore, for Roger Ballen to work with.

The first hurdle I encountered, though, was being told a few weeks before the artist was due to arrive that the 'dungeons' couldn't be used because of health and safety concerns. This was on two levels: air quality was poor, we were told, with potentially high mould levels, and there was only a single point of entrance and egress (presumably since the tunnel had been blocked), which was a fire hazard. I suggested practical solutions to these supposedly impossible problems. We would warn visitors of possible poor air quality and offer free protective face masks to any who wanted to use them. And we would only allow guided tours of the 'dungeons' with groups limited in size to the number allowable in the space under health and safety regulations (in this case 20). Little did I realise that this was to be an unintended masterstroke. In the first place, the 'dungeons' were some distance away from the SCA Galleries and difficult to find for someone who didn't know the campus, so a guided tour meant that visitors would be led there and not become lost (the architecture of the Kirkbride complex is notoriously disorienting). Moreover, the requirement for booking and limited access generated a real desire for visitors to see the normally inaccessible spaces. I had been worried that people would miss this part of the show. In fact, we were overwhelmed with bookings and had to add extra slots to cope with demand.


Ballen's first gallery installation work was made only in 2011, beginning with a room in the 
Museum Het Domein in Sittard in The Netherlands. This installation was essentially driven by drawings of personages, rather than three-dimensional representation. Subsequent ones became more sculptural and more sophisticated in their use of objects, sound and movement (there is a brief account of the development of Ballen's installation practice in Chapter 3 of my The World According to Roger Ballen, Thames & Hudson, 2019). In Sydney, Ballen transformed part of the system of textured, raw subterranean cells and tunnels beneath the old Callan Park Mental Hospital into a provocative, suggestive installation that created a fictionalized version of confinement and terror, completed by some of the sounds and perfumes of the underworld.

In the course of around ten days Ballen worked with his artistic director, Marguerite Rossouw and a team of artist volunteers, including graduate students and alumni of SCA (Priscilla Bourne, Daisy Knight, Georgina MacNeil, Nikki Walkerden, Richard Kean and occasional others) and another amazing Australian visual and performance artist, Wart, to produce from scratch a compelling and affecting set of interrelated vignettes. Materials were quickly gathered. There was much hunting around still-deserted buildings on campus. Richard Kean drove Ballen around Sydney to thrift stores and recycling centres. And there was a certain amount of dumpster-diving. Then, led by Marguerite, the group set about transforming some of the underground spaces according to Ballen's vision.

Early stages of work on Theatre of Darkness. l to r Priscilla Bourne, Daisy Knight, Nikki Walkerden, Marguerite Rossouw, Roger Ballen, and Wart

Theatre of Darkness, installation photograph

Theatre of Darkness, installation view through cell door peephole

Theatre of the Mind, sofa with artists' clothes and equipment during installation

The spaces already some bore marks of previous film shoots and parties. A cell door, for example, was a prop left over from some movie. To this Ballen added another genuine door from an old isolation cell in one of the still-deserted buildings above ground. As always with his work, real and unreal interact and merge. Similarly, some of the walls had drawings on them and, in places, sets of numbers scratched on the wall, suggesting strange calculations, all from visual art or filmic activity postdating the time of the hospital. To these Ballen and some of the others added their own drawings in chalk and charcoal so that they could be easily removed subsequently.

Wall drawings by assitants, "Theatre of Darkness" 

Wall drawings by assistants, "Theatre of Darkness"

Large drawing on a cotton sheet by Roger Ballen hanging from a barred window, Theatre of Darkness

Marguerite Rossouw can conjure the sense of a human body from very scant means and although there were quite a number of personages in the "Theatre of Darkness", none were constructed as a complete collection of body parts. Rather, the body - and its lifelikeness - was inferred, to great effect.

Roger Ballen and Marguerite Rossouw, figure in a cell, work in progress, Theatre of Darkness

Roger Ballen and Marguerite Rossouw, figures calling to the light, Theatre of Darkness

Figures calling to the light, in construction

Roger Ballen and Marguerite Rossouw, medical room figure in progress

I had wondered at the beginning whether Ballen would use the installation to make photographs (I know now that his art installations are intentionally quite distinct from the conditions in which he makes photographs), but in the end he decided to make a short and powerful film, Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind. Once again, this was an art school affair. The same group of assistants acted and helped in the filming, and the work was produced by SCA alumna, Tanja Bruckner, with sound design by staff member, Shaun Hay. It was released on YouTube to coincide with the opening of Sydney's HeadOn Photo Festival. The film can be viewed here Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind. Film, 2016, 2.09

Katherine Gillespie's review of the film in Vice, from 12 May 2016, can be read here Roger Ballen releases terrifying two-minute horror film

Ballen in the Theatre of Darkness during the filming of "Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind"

The completed "Theatre of Darkness" installation was a thrilling, disquieting and uncanny experience for viewers. Lighting levels were very low and the various were tableaus obscured and difficult to see. This only added to the intensity of the experience. Viewers had to peer and get close to doors and dirty curtains, where they might otherwise have kept a comfortable distance. They had to really look. And besides the abiding musty smell of the place, unnerving subterranean sounds disturbed the quiet. All of this was impossible to document in photographs, but the film at least suggests something of the feel of the thing.

A year later Ballen spoke to me about the experience of making the show in Sydney.

RB: The show we made was unique because it was made in a particular environment that reinforced the notions of the imagery in some ways. The whole architecture around it. It wasn't just a sterile environment. It's always hard to judge what people will think and what things will look like; how they’ll react. But the gallery we showed in was a very special place and the installation was part of the exhibition, so there was an added layer to what we did. I guess it expanded various notions of the aesthetic.

CR: Did the experience of the Theatre of the Mind change anything for you? 

RB: I think the thing that played a big role in it – its one thing to go to an exhibition and to make a talk to the students or whatever, but it’s another thing to go to a place and be creative. So making a video left a very strong impression on me because I delved deeper and I integrated my experience in that place with my photographs and my own history and to a degree the history of the place. So it left a very strong impression.

You asked me earlier what I look for in the work – I look for what challenges me; what I don't have an answer for. When I do it, I can’t necessarily comprehend the meaning of my own work and it sometimes takes months or years before I come to some coherent emotional and intuitive relationship with the pictures I did. So these works I’m doing now have that element in them that is challenging me. And it is because they challenge me that I continue with the work, otherwise I wouldn’t do it.

Today, an important new exhibition of Ballen's work has opened at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris - see Le Monde Selon Roger Ballen About half of the show consists of an interlocking series of installations constructed especially for the ground floor gallery over the last four weeks by Ballen and Rossouw, with assistance from museum staff. As always with the installations, this was an iterative process that was impossible to pre-plan in any but the vaguest detail. Constructed on site, especially for this space, they are truly site specific. However, it is a sign of the maturity of Ballen's installation practice today that the works draw their character entirely from within, without reliance on the fabric of the building or some previous incarnation and use.