Chelsea Space’s Reading Room for the exhibition
#74 ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE
25.04.2018 to 25.05.2018
Chelsea SPACE, London
Artists: Beatrice Gibson, Alison Knowles, Ghislaine Leung, Annea Lockwood, Claire Potter, Charlotte Prodger, Carolee Schneemann, Tai Shani, Mieko Shiomi
Exhibition curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell
Reading Room curated by Carla Gimeno Jaria, Ruby Ziyuan Liu and Raffaella Matrone
ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE is a group exhibition looking at practices that emerge between text and performance, the page and the body, combining a display and events programme of historical and contemporary works. Newly commissioned and existing works will intersect with an array of archival material located in Carolee Schneemann's Parts of a Body House [1968-1972], from which the exhibition title derives, and Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's score anthology Womens Work [1975- 8]. ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE seeks an alternative framework to look at the influence of conceptual procedures as well as experimental writing within contemporary feminist performance practices across visual art, sound and text. The exhibition seeks to highlight these significant trans- historical sensibilities, whilst acknowledging their disjuncts. Each artist brings a particular method, procedure or interrogation to the act of writing or performing text, blurring descriptions such as text, score, work, performance, version and iteration.
ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE’s exhibition display is accompanied by a day of live performance, a workshop, a publication and an affiliated symposium to take place in May 2018. Curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell.
The reading room featured as an introductory space to the main exhibition and, alongside the display of artist’s book and research material on the participating artists, was home to the reports of two re-enactments of the scores of Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem (1965-1975) , a conceptual work in which she developed nine separate actions. Each action was sent by Shiomi to different colleagues and artists around the world, who were asked to perform them through a set of given instructions. She then collected the reports and documentation of the scores and published a book which explored the transcontinental communication and text as mean of performance.
With support from:
Arts Council England
ELECTRA Productions
UAL Chelsea College of Arts
Chelsea Arts Club Trust
Image credits: Raffaella Matrone
www.chelseaspace.org
