Archiwalna

CORIN SWORN – The Time of the Foxes

01.07.2016 – 18.08.2016

Arsenal Gallery, ul. A. Mickiewicza 2, Białystok

Corin Sworn and her dad are looking at his old photographs. Dating back to the 1970s they appear on a slide projector. ‘I got a boat that took me from Liverpool to Lima’ he says. Sworn’s dad is Gavin Smith, an anthropologist who spent time in Peru studying peasant rebellions. As this twenty-minute film – titled The Foxes – progresses Smith tells his daughter stories from his time there: of the characters he met, of their history, his academic conclusions and his personal feelings pertaining to the place he visited so long ago. Sworn recalls that she has seen many of these photos, and heard the tales behind them before, when her dad visited her school in 1981 and presented them to Sworn’s class. ‘At the time I didn’t understand the pictures or the related experiences he described’ she notes in the narration.

The rhythmic click-click-click of the slide projector is periodically interrupted with moving image. It is also shot in Peru – Huasicancha, a highland village, to be exact – but recently, filmed by Sworn herself. She has retraced her father’s youthful footsteps, taking him along as her guide. Together they meet many of the people Smith had worked with and interviewed back in the 1970s. It appears as if not much has changed in Huasicancha. In fact, the viewer might be forgiven for mistaking the present day for an image of the past. Their mode of representation – still slides against moving video – is the only real way to distinguish between them. There is something strange is happening here. The past and present intermingle, connected by this familial bond. The structure could be likened to the Bergson’s plane of images in which the philosopher rejects the fundamentals of lineal time; he argues instead that the self is a point of encounter between perception (the light, colour and form of the images around us) and the memory-image. Sworn here enacts that meeting. Near the start of the video we see a street passing by from the inside of a moving car. The footage is doubled however as the car window reflects the opposite image. It’s a blurry doubling effect Sworn recreates with a series of photographs that accompany the video installation in which the artist has exposed one of her dad’s original negatives over the top of a photograph of the exact same location Sworn took on her more recent trip. Again there is confusion in what we are looking at. Sworn pauses the video footage to note that in the blur caused by the speed of the car, a pedestrian looks like he is disappearing out of the picture. Like a ghost, adrift from time and space, he’s falling through the image. Slipping from the Bergsonian plane. A Peruvian pop song plays on the stereo.

When Smith shows his old photographs to the village folk of Huasicancha, there is often a moment of either mis-recognition or non-recognition of the people depicted in them. Two women fail to realise that they are looking a snap of the man standing next to them, the man’s young self totally at odds with the portly chap they now know. Time has all but dislocated the two bodies. We experience it ourselves too. One of the first slides features Sworn as a young child. Even if we were familiar with what the artist looked like (she herself is always behind the camera in moving image sections, present but not visible) it would be hard to place her in this grainy group picture. In this film only the people change. They grow older, they decay. A photo of Smith appears on the screen. “Yeah, so” he says hesitantly. “That’s what I looked like when I was doing field work”.

This is no anthropological study on some distant village, but a self-portrait of sorts. Sworn’s gaze is not outward, across the sea to Peru, but inward to the memories – the memory-images – that she is formed from. The work reflects on the flow of incoming visual messages from which consciousness is constructed. In the introduction to one of his essays concerning the rural communities of Peru, Smith writes poetically ‘All intellectual pursuits like anthropology and history are, in the end, attempts to help us come to terms with the unspeakable’. The self is barely possible to speak of, for we have to speak through it. Self-reflectivity requires the impossibility of stepping outside oneself. The Foxes is an attempt to do this.

Oliver Basciano, London, 2016

Corin Sworn

b. 1976, London, UK, Lives and works in Glasgow, UK

Education:

2007-2009 MFA, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
1999-2002 BFA, Integrated Media Program, Emily Carr Institue of Art & Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2001-2002 BA, Art & Design Program, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, UK
1994-1999 BA Psychology, minor Art History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Selected Solo Exhibitions:

2015 Natalia Hug, Cologne, Germany
2015 Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy
2015 Whitechapel Gallery, London
2014 Vibrant Matter, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany
2014 Inverleith House, Edinburgh, UK
2014 The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK
2013 The Rag Papers, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany
2013 The Rag Papers, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK
2012 The Lens Prism, Artists Film International:
2012 Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
2012 Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy
2012 Fundacion PRÓA, Buenos Aires; Argentina
2012 San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
2012 Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong
2012 Istanbul Modern , Istanbul, Turkey
2012 Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas, USA
2012 City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
2012 Belgrade Cultural Centre, Belgrade; Serbia
2012 Cinemateque de Tanger, Tangier, Morocco
2012 New Media Center at Haifa Art Museum, Haifa, Israel
2012 Neuer Berliner Kunstverein Video Forum, Berlin, Germany
2011 Timespan Museum and Arts Centre, Helmsdale, Scotland
2011 An Endless Renovation, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
2011 An Endless Renovation, ArtNow, Tate Britain, London
2010 Blanket, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2010 The Lens Prism, Tramway, Glasgow
2010 Prologue: An Endless Renovation, Washington Garcia, Glasgow
2008 Back in 5: Accessing the Backstory, Blanket Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2008 Corin Sworn, ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions:

2014 I’m So Green, Natalia Hug, Cologne
2013-14 Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain 2008–2013 Tate Britain
2014 You Imagine What You Desire, 19TH Biennale of Sydney
2014 Storytelling, with Althea Thauberger, Zin Taylor and Isabelle Pauwels, National Gallery of Canada
2013 55th Venice Biennale, Scotland Pavilion (with Duncan Campbell and Hayley Tompkins)
2013 ANALOGUE OTHER, Poor Farm, Manawa, WI
2012 Les Séparés, CEAAC, Strasbourg
2012 Paraphantoms, Temporary Gallery, Cologne
2012 21 REVOLUTIONS: TWO DECADES OF CHANGING MINDS’, Intermedia, Glasgow
2012 Tales of the City: Art Fund International and the GoMA collection, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
2012 Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow Since WWII, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
2012 Doppelganger, CEAAC, Alsace
2012 Phantasmagoria, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver
2012 Studio 58, Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow
2012 ICA Biennial of Moving Image, ICA London, London, UK
2012 Dialogue for Hands, with Chris Johansen, Camilla Low, Mary Redmond and Corin Sworn, Three Blows, Glasgow, UK
2012 Tomorrow Never Knows, Jerwood Space, London
2011 Hors Pistes 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris
2011 Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
2010 School Days, Featuring Darcy Lange, Corin Sworn, Rineke Dijkstra, Eva Kotatkova, Ronan McCrea, Raimond Wouda, Eamon O’Kane, University College, Cork, Ireland 2010 / 2011
2010 Hello World with Darren Banks, Luke Collins, Jonathan Horowitz, Seth Price, Corin Sworn, and Stina Wirfelt, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh
2010 Playgrounds: Police or Pirates, Quartier, the Quimper Centre for Contemporary Art, Quimper, France
2010 Art Basel Miami Beach / Creative Time presents video screenings: Corin Sworn, ‘After School Special’, Miami, Fl, In partnership with Tramway Game Show, Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, British Columbia
2010 Group Program, Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York
2010 COSEY COMPLEX, a special one-day event conceived by writer Maria Fusco and commissioned by the ICA, ICA, London, UK
2010 Morality, Act 5: Power Alone, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands
2010 Two people show with David Gledhill, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK
2009 Report on Probability, Kunshalle, Basel, Basel
EASTInternational2009, Norwich, UK, Curated by Art and Language and Raster Gallery
2009 Elspeth Pratt and Corin Sworn, Blanket Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2009 Love Me Tender, Autostadt Wolfsburg, Germany
2009 Drawings A-Z, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon

Residencies:

2012 The Rusking School of Drawing and Fine Art at St John’s College, Oxford, UK
2008 EASTinternational, Norwich University College of the Arts, Norwich, UK

Awards:

2014 MaxMara Art Prize for Women in association with the Whitechapel
2008 EASTproject assisted research
2007 BC Arts Council Production Grant
2007 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant
2005 Visual Arts Development Award
2004 Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant

Museum Collections:

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, UK
Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
National Gallery of Canada
Vancouver Art Galelry, Vancouver, Canada
Colecçăo Madeira Corporate Services – MCA, Portugal

Related events:

2 July 2016, 11.00 – a guided tour of the exhibition with the exhibition curator and artist.

The event will be adapted to the needs of hearing impaired or deaf people.

Interpreted by: Justyna Nowosadko

Admission is free

Curator: Sylwia Narewska
Corin Sworn

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Opening times:
Thuesday – Sunday
10:00-18:00

Last admission
to exhibition is at:
17.30

PLAN YOUR VISIT

CORIN SWORN – The Time of the Foxes

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