Taking Moyra Davey’s exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall as its inspiration, “On Reading” brings together a group of artists, writers and performers to explore reading as a distinct and singular practice within contemporary art.

“Hemlock Forest” is the first exhibition in Scandinavia by the New York based, Canadian artist, Moyra Davey. Much of Davey’s work centers on the everyday of her own life — as a photographer and filmmaker, and as an avid reader and writer. Initially working in photography, in recent years she has developed a series of essay films that layer personal narratives onto highly engaged explorations of particular authors, artists and texts. Within Davey’s work – in both its visual and inscribed forms – the act of reading, and a self reflexive writing practice, hold a prominent role.

Despite her use of quotation and citation, Davey’s work is as much a meditation on her own artistic processes as it is on those of others; an exploration of the irrepressible drive to create and make; and that strange symbiotic dichotomy between a life lived and a life written down or recorded. In Davey’s work, reading so often seems to be the central locus through which this reflection takes place. 

The public program “On Reading” will bring together artists, writers and scholars who share with Davey, not only an interest in literature and writing, but also an acute awareness for reading as a ‘practice’ within both literature and contemporary visual art, and for reading as a core artistic mode.

On screen
NOVEL film programme including a.o. B.S Johnson, Paradigm, 1970; Chen Zhou, My Loving Artist - Yu Honglei, 2012; Bernadette Corporation, Hell Frozen Over, 2000; Stephen Sutcliffe, Writer in Residence, 2010; Cerith Wyn Evans, Degrees of Blindness, 1988; Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Comma, Pregnant Pause, 2004;  Arash Nassiri, Darwin Darwah, 2016.

B.S Johnson Paradigm (1970) 10:00 min. This experimental film explores one of writer and film-maker B.S. Johnson's recurring obsessions - that the older you get, the less you have to say and the more difficulty you have in saying it. William Hoyland stars as a nameless protagonist, who speaks to the camera in a fabricated language and, through the course of the film, transforms from young and verbose, to old and inarticulate.

Nicole Miller, The Alphabet (2007) 02:38 min screen capture. Miller’s use of the screencast as political gesture figures a textual image. On screen we see Miller retrieving several videos from her browser. She presents clips of Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, Lou Rawls and Jackie Robinson reciting the alphabet on the television show Sesame Street. The men in the video use different forms of expression—comedy, drama, soul and sport—to transform the alphabet. Richard Pryor performs a comedic alphabet while Jackie Robinson recites the letters. James Earl Jones slowly pushes through the letters as Bill Cosby talks to himself about “Things that make you go HMMMM.” The desktop is a unique site, introspective and outward facing, where conception, production, and distribution can simultaneously occur.

Chen Zhou My Loving Artist - Yu Honglei (2012) 04:20 min Film transferred to DVD. Chen’s subject is his friend and fellow artist Yu Honglei. Yu is presented in a tender video as a somewhat melancholy young man leafing through photos of himself as vaunted youth. He is thinking about Jeff Koons. As the artist repeats the text, the subject is not him anymore, but a friend who saw the show. And there is a transition between the subject, the artist, his friend and Koons. The subject does not think by himself, borrowing from others, coming back to face the camera to declare his fondness for the work. Koons represents not only an artist but an icon from western culture to be appropriated, where image becomes exchangeable as a subject to the point of dilution.

Bernadette Corporation Hell Frozen Over (2000) 19:22 min video. Bernadette Corporation describe this work as "a fashion film about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the color white." Hell Frozen Over employs a range of strategies to approach the idea of nothingness, emptiness, and vacuity, with an eye to how these notions relate to contemporary mass-cultural entertainment. Positioning documentary film on a fashion shoot with footage of semiologist Sylvère Lotringer giving an impromptu lecture on Mallarmé on a frozen lake, Hell Frozen Over maintains an ambiguous stance from which to both critique and celebrate the power of surface.

Stephen Sutcliffe, Writer in Residence (2010) 03:00 min HD video. Writer in Residence take the form of a TV-style interview and continues Sutcliffe's interest in collage as a means to undermine certainty. Sutcliffe poses the melancholic hallucination that is Adrian Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947wrought with self-doubt and interior monologue, as presented by Colin Wilson in his novel The Outsider (1956) - a philosophical standpoint that was developed through Wilson's own critique of Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil. This neurotic experience of artistic production, often felt but rarely admitted, figures the uneasy relationship between established and emergent voices that feed Sutcliffe’s interest in class and auto-didacticism.

Dora Garcia, The Joyceian Society (2013) 53:00 min video. A group of people have been reading a book together for thirty years. They have been reading it again and again, with each journey from the first to the last page taking eleven years. Once they reach the last word, a very enigmatic “the,” they begin again with the first word, “riverrun.” The text appears inexhaustible, its interpretation endless, the inconclusive nature of the reading exciting.

Steve Reinke, Anal Masturbation and Object Loss (2002), 05:54 min video. Reinke envisions an art institute where you don't have to make anything and with a library full of books glued together. The image is a shot of Reinke glue sticking the pages of a book together. He voices his fantasy about a library where all the books have been sealed shut: all the information remains, but no one has to bother reading. Reinke pounces on the moment when the presence of two items in a list creates a levelling of unlikely objects. In the video Reinke explains that his new art school will limit discourse to three subjects: classical rhetoric, theosophy and Martin Heidegger – and Heidegger ‘not as a philosophic system but as a series of provocative compound words’. Following on from this move from philosophy to words, the voiceover then considers the relation between meaning and physical space occupied – for example, by glued-together books or the projection of a video in a gallery – while also speculating on Heideggerian desire for a precision of meaning (‘I would like anal masturbation to refer only to anal masturbation’) so drastic that ideas turn from sculptures to objects to placeholders (‘Object Loss’).

Ed Atkins, Death Mask II: The Scent (2010). 08:19 min video HD. Atkins’ screenplays shrug off narrative development in favour of vivid and dense descriptive passages that escape the fantasy of literature and enter material existence. The screen play Death Mask II offers a ‘partial exegesis’ for some of the images within the film, focusing on descriptions of the durian fruit, infamous for its disgusting and indescribable smell reminiscent of a rotting corpse. The corpse, as articulated through French theorist Maurice Blanchot’s descriptions of cadavers as representations of living beings, is a recurrent theme in Atkins’s films, and one in which he finds affinities with the increasingly ‘realistic’ imagery produced by high definition digital technology.

Cerith Wyn Evans, Degrees of Blindness (1988) 18:58 min video. A short experimental film directed by Cerith Wyn Evans, featuring Tilda Swinton and Leigh Bowery. Inspired by a William Blake poem, the film queries our perception of vision from the reading of a braille map by a blind child to the newest forms of visual representation; Degrees of Blindness questions what it is to be looked at and to be seen.

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Comma, Pregnant Pause (2004) 27:00 min video transferred to DVD. A comma indicates a pause or break between parts of a sentence; in spoken communication, a pregnant pause is one that is full of meaning - significant - suggestive. This video features mobile phones, in whose text messages commas are seldom used. There are often, however, pregnant pauses during the wait for a reply. The ubiquitous mobile phone logo from Carphone Warehouse, and their faces covered by ‘Scream’ masks referencing Hollywood horror and Munch. The two protagonists’ conversation is indicated by two different text alerts - '1,2,3,4' and a musical sound - guitar or harp - whilst each text message appears as a series of subtitles. The conversations are fractured and messages stray like Beat poetry, where 'the newest thing is now wearing the word'.

Arash Nassiri, Darwin Darwah (2016)
12:24 min video HD. Darwin Darwah is named after a taxi driver’s expression comparing Darwin's theory to the Arabic word Darwah (meaning « a mess »). During a journey through Paris catacombs, a voice over tells us stories about hidden underground cities and their connection to civilizations. While hearing these stories, artefacts appear as fossils on the tunnels walls. The voiceover speculates that Egyptians built Paris, alien life forms rendered dinosaurs extinct and put humans in their place. The taxi driver’s theories are beliefs popularized by online conspiracy videos. Conspiracy theories linked to the apparition and propagation of media and the stories we tell ourselves. Darwin Darwah uses 3D scans of historical museum collections from the Louvre’s Egyptian antiques, Museum of Palaeontology and Museum of Space Exploration. Each chronological part of the voice over is shown through a historical collection displaced in the Paris catacombs. An anti institutional story of humanity emerges through historical objects of the institutions cast in military night vision technology, recalling UFO and ghost hunters footage.

On Reading is presented by Bergen Kunsthall’s lecture series Plattform, in collaboration with NOVEL (Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams). It has been organised on the occasion of the solo exhibition “Hemlock Forest” by Moyra Davey, at Bergen Kunsthall. Platform is supported by Fritt Ord

On Reading, brings together artists, writers and performers to explore reading as a distinct and singular practice within contemporary art. With lectures and readings from Hannah Gregory, Karolin Meunier, Elaine Cameron-Weir and Travis Jeppesen; a remote conversation between Aveek Sen (Calcutta) and Moyra Davey (New York); a Landmark screening of Sidsel Meineche Hansen Seroquel®, 2014; a play by Studio for Propositional Cinema, Cut With Some Pieces of Cinematography: A Sonata for Two Women, 2016; and a DJ set by Steven Warwick aka Heatsick.

In Texte zur Kunst’s recent themed issue “Poetry”, Karolin Meunier contributes with the essay “Hearing Voices – On the Reading and Performance of Poetry”. Reading in relation to writing, and the state of “being read” is a perspective that highlights the significance that various modes of sharing might have on the act of authorship itself. In her analysis of this phenomenon, Karolin Meunier takes Berlin-based writer Haytham El-Wardany’s book “How to Disappear” as a key example. In its consideration of reading silently versus reading aloud, she argues, it destabilizes both the boundaries of the self and the idea of possession itself – including, not least, the subject’s possession of his or her own voice.

Karolin Meunier is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

As well as the productive aspects of reading in itself, reading is a way of passing time, forgetting time; something done while waiting, a precursor to doing. Hannah Gregory will consider Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘impasse’ – “a state of animated suspension”, “a poetic of immanent [and imminent] world-making”, in relation to reading, and to Moyra Davey’s work. Taking texts as “temporary shelters”, she will think about how reading as a fortifying mode of thought occupies the time before both creative work and real-world actions.

Hannah Gregory is a writer and editor living in Berlin. Her writing on contemporary culture has appeared in Art Monthly, The New Inquiry, frieze and The Wire, among other publications. She is a co-editor of the art writing journal Aorist and keeps a TinyLetter Thresholds.

In addition to his work as a novelist, art critic and poet, Travis Jeppesen has developed what he terms “object-oriented writing”—writing that seeks to use language as a site for a subjective, embodied encounter with and response to art objects. Jeppesen’s writing treats objects themselves as inhabitable, in an attempt to write from within the object; this approach intends to counter distanced forms of critical analysis to which art is usually subjected. As he has written: “Objects have no feelings… but could they?”

In his installation 16 Sculptures, visitors—sitting while blindfolded—listen to recordings of Jeppesen reading his object-oriented re-creations of sculptures. Depriving us of our usual faculties for experiencing works of art—sight and visual-spatial reasoning—Jeppesen’s texts instead stage an encounter with objects through language that nonetheless retains the texture of embodied, physical experience, an imaginative realm in which he attempts to summon the autonomous essences and interior lives of objects themselves.

For the event in Bergen, Jeppesen will introduce and present excerpts from 16 Sculptures as a reading/performance.

Aveek Sen and Moyra Davey will engage in a conversation about Reading, which will take place via Skype. Davey will be speaking from her apartment in New York with Sen at his home in Calcutta. When working on his essay for the forthcoming publication on Moyra Davey’s exhibition at the Kunsthall, Sen and Davey had several such skype conversations across the continents. For this conversation, we are able to ‘wire-tap’ into their correspondence from Bergen, and listen in on their exchanges.

In his essay “Low-hanging Fruit” Sen reflects both on Moyra Davey’s act of reading within her films, as well as his own attempt of ‘reading’ Davey’s work through his own writing: “What if caught within my repeated viewing of the films, I end up rehearsing their words and action, copying into my notes what the film-maker reads out incessantly? She reads she makes notes, she writes, she films what she reads and writes, and makes films in which she reads out what she writes; I write in my notes what she reads out about what she has read, I read up what she has read. What if I am trapped in this cycle, this infinite regress, of reading, writing, filming and making notes?”

A writer on art, literature, music and society, Aveek Sen is also an Associate Editor, The Telegraph, Kolkata. Sen’s practice as a writer has a focus on the intersections between art, literature, cinema, music and everyday life. He has lectured in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and is the recipient of a number of awards including the Infinity Award for Writing on Photography (2009); The Reuters Fellowship, Green College, Oxford (2005); and the Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford.

Elaine Cameron-Weir reads from Data Collection. Cameron-Weir was born in 1985, Alberta, Canada. Currently, she lives and works in New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Venus over Los Angeles as well as inclusion in the Montreal Biennale, curated by Philippe Pirotte.

Cut With Some Pieces of Cinematography: A Sonata for Two Women (2016) is a play by Studio for Propositional Cinema which incorporates many of their prior texts and performances into a narrative dialogue between two actors and the audience. The two actors shift between collectivized stand-ins and subjectivized humans, recalling characters from sources as varied as Ingmar Berman, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Smog.

SCENE:

Two women, E and L, in front of an audience.

L
(to audience)
Silence. Silence. A request for silence: Silence enough to make audible the sound of cold air crashing on electric heat as they seep in and out of windows.

E
(to L)
You placed before my eyes all the material in your possession and explained the meaning of it. We organized and summarized. It was a long time since we had undertaken something together. You seemed pleased, I understood that this is what you wanted and expected from me. At the end of the day you disappeared again with your bag and I returned to my apartment to study the notes.

L
(to audience)
We are manipulating transparent materials into convex and concave forms. These forms are organized in relation to each other in order to allow them or force them to focus the relationship between light and the material world in a manner that may allow material realities to be viewed in contexts not otherwise physically viable within the given properties of human vision.

E
(to audience)
The effect of these object relations may also, through chemical, electronic, or as yet undiscovered processes, be recorded and be preserved as images as, into, or onto objects in order to be viewed within the program of human vision and/or contexts within a potentially infinite series of potential material relations. These preservable recorded images are realizable through a series of processes that transform an ever-receding present into or onto a slowly receding material object or objects, the chemical compounds of which may decompose at rates slower than our human bodies.

Studio for Propositional Cinema, Cut With Some Pieces of Cinematography: A Sonata for Two Women, 2016

Studio for Propositional Cinema was founded in 2013 with a public call to action. Through language, actions, sounds and images, through production, publication, exhibition and fiction, they seek to reconfigure culture from a network of ideological formations into a dialogue of hypothetical gestures.

The CGI animation Seroquel® considers the concept of self-destruction and increasing prescriptions of anti-depressants, as an industrial complex “that allows capitalism to enter into our relationship to ourselves.” The film features the avatar Eva 3.0 (the main protagonist in Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s recent work and the object of her research into virtual/post-human sex) dubbed by a ‘metalogue’ performed by empowerment speaker and post-punk legend Lydia Lunch.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen is an artist based in London. Her work takes the form of woodcut prints, sculptures, CGI and VR animations which typically foreground the body’s industrial complex in the pharmaceutical, porn and tech industries. Her work also manifests as publications and as an ongoing series of seminars. In 2015 she co-edited _Politics of Study (London and Odense: Open Editions and Funen Art Academy). Currently, she is a visiting scholar at CalArts and works as an associate professor at the Funen Art Academy, Denmark.

The Berlin-based visual artist and producer will play a kaleidoscopic DJ set of stripped-down club edits and frenetic hi-energy to pulse the dance floor. Steven Warwick’s multidisciplinary work invites the interaction of objects and media within an immersive environment. In his dance music project Heatsick, he sends a solitary Casio through a myriad of effects, looping up coarse, crisp, and twinkling out-house music into wonderfully queasy eternity. He teases out melodic and rhythmic mantras to an off-kilter, Burroughsian effect that wins on the floor and never forgets to be lo-fi fun(k).

NOVEL Upstairs is published as part of the Upstairs Residency Programme at Bergen Kunsthall 22 November– 11 December 2016

For the Upstairs residency, NOVEL (Alun Rowlands & Matt Williams) will host events, readings, screenings and the dispersion of a new publication. Upstairs will be cast in the yellow glow of Mark Leckey’s Untitled (Sodium Light), 2014 and filled by the sound and textual image of Hannah Black’s Power Cut 1970, 2012. The NOVEL archive covers the walls of Upstairs as a locus for reading and the fictioning of a scenario.

Off-Site
30-31 January 2017: Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek, Strømgaten 6, 5015 Bergen
1 February 2017: Odda Bibliotek, Rådhuset Opheimsgata 31, 5750 Odda

The Quiet Volume, Tim Etchells & Ant Hampton NOVEL’s Upstairs residency will conclude with The Quiet Volume a whispered, self-generated (autoteatro) performance for two visitors at a time, exploiting the particular tension common to libraries: a combination of silence and concentration within which our experiences of reading and listening unfold.

In Oslo
NOVEL Upstairs launch, 8 December 2016, 19:00 at Kunstnernes Hus, as part of Bergen Kunsthall in Oslo, presenting highlights of current programme with Knut Henrik Henriksen and screening of Moyra Davey’s Hemlock Forest, 2016

In print
Ed Atkins, Lutz Bacher, Hannah Black, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, James Hoff, Lisa Holzer, Travis Jeppesen, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Zoe Leonard, Stuart Middleton, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Richard Sides, Cally Spooner, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Martine Syms, Gili Tal, Oscar Tuazon, Peter Wachtler, Steven Warwick & Nora Khan and Canary Wharf.

NOVEL is an editorial and curatorial project, publishing artists writing and texts that oscillates between modes of fiction and poetry. NOVEL acts in-between the potential performance of a script, and the indeterminate transcript of the event. The journal hosts a cacophony of voices that coalesce around writing as a core material of a number of artists exploring language and the speculative force of fiction. Here, art writing is an apparatus for knowledge capture, writing as parallel practice, writing as political fiction, writing as another adventure, renegotiating unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects.