2019, London, UK, 100% recycled plastic bags, digital mixed flow fans, wood, electric compounds, 22 cm x 22cm x max. 342 cm
Waiting for the Racer to Pass by
excerpt of the press release:
Waiting for the Racer to Pass by, a pop-up show organised by artist Edgar Lessig, presents works from six artists at Assembly Point in Peckham, London. The main theme of the exhibition is that of temporality, stemming from the climactic nature of the show. Preparation begins in advance of the event and everyone works frantically towards the culmination: the one-off, once-in-a-lifetime private view.
The title of the exhibition is an ode to this moment, wherein bystanders wait at the side of a racing track for a racer to pass by in a flash. It grapples with the ritualistic gathering at a specific place to witness an event that only lasts moments – disproportionate to all of the preparation, anticipation and suspense. It is a linear narrative which is almost absurd in its catharsis and the exhibition mirrors this sentiment in both its format and in its works’ attempt to address various forms of temporality.
Daniel Hölzl employs site-specific works with similar whimsical effect. Two inflatable pillars create an intervention to the space, mirroring the ways in which towns and cities are disrupted during race events. The viewer is forced into cycles of waiting, expectancy and surprise as the pillars inflate and deflate but the binary nature of the pillars invite the questions–for which version of pillar are we waiting, and why? The presence of two tubes, which rise and fall sometimes out of sync, sometimes concurrently, also hint towards the duality of the viewer/viewed paradigm and its relative power dynamic. The use of recycled bags in the construction of the piece is a timely consideration of the materiality of plastic. Recontextualised within this piece, it allows us to evaluate how the reuse of materials can shift their narrative from simply linear to something more dynamic.
This is an exhibition which attempts to go beyond a simple exploration of temporality, but rather it offers a varied insight to how we, as humans, relate to experiences which are bound or defined by temporal constraints. In Victor Turner’s anthropological essay Liminality and Communitas within ‘The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure’, Turner investigates the idea of the liminal period within social rites of passage and ritual, writing that ‘what is interesting about liminal phenomena [...] is the blend they offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship’. In many ways, the artists all depict their own form of ritual or ceremony. With both Tschaidse and Blanco, we are presented with works which confront a sense of occasion, somehow in a way which manipulates the viewer to redefine and reauthor their relation to a certain event, even collectively. Works by Lessig and Hölzl investigate a form of temporal liminality by focusing on the medial and in between within everyday and nonsensical rituals. And Yana and Kyritsopoulou’s works bring us closer to a more personal form of ritual – that of making, crafting and hobbying through which they either enshrine or derobe their objects of a sense of time.
written by Marc James Gough