Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson will activate ‘Writing Copora’, the installation by Gary Hill, on Saturday
The performance is part of ‘Presencia activa’ [Active Presence], an exhibition which analyses the role of the artist and the viewer
This Saturday 20 October Swedish artist Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson will activate the installation Writing Corpora by Gary Hill, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of video art. Writing Corpora is part of Presencia activa [Active Presence], an exhibition coproduced by the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón and MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo [Contemporary Art Museum in Vigo]. The show, curated by Sergio Edelsztein, Director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, and Kathleen Forde, Artistic director of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, analyses the role of the artist and the spectator and the endless possibilities of interaction between them. The exhibition can be seen at LABoral until 25 February 2013.
Gary Hill (Santa Monica, 1951) has worked since the 80s with the idea of video installation as a whole that involves the viewer both mentally and physically. From 7 pm on Saturday 20 October, the public will be able to see the interpretation of this piece by Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson, one of his usual collaborators in various works. Writing Corpora (2011) is an installation and a performance in which the Californian artist, faithful to his interest in linguistics and its shades of meaning and double entendres, plays with commonly known idiomatic expressions and with set phrases that refer to parts of the human body in order to illustrate meaning. Gary Hill appropriates these phrases or expressions and represents them in their most literal sense, thereby revealing their incongruous and absurd nature. The allusions to the body lose their anatomic functionality and become a part of metaphorical and associative processes.
Writing Corpora is a work about translation. The expressions are translated from English to Spanish and vice versa, and also from the spoken language to the physical language. In addition, through technology the artist’s bodily presence is “translated” into a virtual existence in which the artist himself is given form. However, all of the translations are found to be impossible and start a chain of distortion and paucity of which the viewer is also a part, since he or she interacts with the artist’s virtual presence and “materialised” phrases.
Paulina Wallenberg Olsson is a performer and musician under the name of Nosslo Grebnellaw Aniluap – her name spelled backwards. As part of the Wallenberg project, she collaborates with different artists creating images, music and performances which, in a childlike and surreal way, explore the potential in the synthesis of images and performances working with pop music. As an artist she works under the pseudonym of New Population and her work is part of the collections at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and New York’s MoMA. She has collaborated with Gary Hill on numerous occasions including Dark Resonances in 2005 with Charles Stein, Black Performance in 2003 and Remembering Paralinguay in 2000.
Proyecto Wallenberg:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wallenberg/17780425821
New Population: http://newpopulation.tumblr.com/