On the occasion of her first solo show at Arcade Brussels, Anna Barham presents a group of new works made using the language she produces collaboratively with other readers and computer processes in her live production reading groups. Light Swathes Crossing is a video developed from passages from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Gustav Flaubert’s descriptions of St Anthony’s hallucinations in the desert in The Temptation of St Anthony. A series of framed works incorporate other texts, materials and images using the psychedelic description of St Anthony’s dissolution of self as a kind of anti-structure.
Alongside the exhibition, our new platform for publications Pete and Repeat will host Barham’s recent book Poisonous Oysters alongside a series of her other publications, editions and works on paper. The physical home of Pete and Repeat in Brussels is a structure designed by Barham as part of her ongoing Crystal Fabric Field project. For Light Swathes Crossing the structure also extends into the front gallery space becoming support for the video and audience.
Anna Barham’s work explores translation, authorship and subjectivity as distributed forms of agency. She uses video, text, print, installation and live events, to create works and situations that consider the audience as further agents in the production and transformation of ‘sense’. Recent projects include To be we to be, Quote-Unquote, Bucharest RO; Liquid Crystal Display, Site Gallery, Sheffield and MIMA, Middlesbrough; A sentence can be ours and ours, Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven, BE; This is a voice, Wellcome Collection, London and MAAS, Sydney; Secret Surface, K-W, Berlin; and Nouveau Festival: Air de jeu, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Her work is represented internationally in the public collections that include: Tate, London, UK; Government Art Collection, London, UK; V&A, London, UK; SFMOMA, San Francisco, US; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, ES.
One may want to, or manage to for a while, but
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
Knowing yourself by yourself means poison
2020
ink on paper, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
of poisonous chemicals in small quantities
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
This seems so clearly the case with grief
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
The theory of the interpretation of dreams
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
one is undone
2020
ink on paper, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
back surface toward each other and begin to ignore
2020
ink on paper, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
Light Swathes Crossing
2020
HD video
15’29”
Yet language is not everything
2020
ink on paper, etched perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
clue to where the self loses its boundaries
2020
ink on paper, silicone headphone tips, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
amorphous, as if the china of the plate
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
Let’s face it
2020
ink on paper, printed perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
eyes. He does not trust his eyes
2020
ink on paper, punched paper, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm
he will grasp new objects, as yet unfelt
2020
ink on paper, etched perspex, aluminium frame
358 x 328 x 35 mm