Céline Condorelli Aleksandra Domanovic Jamie Fitzpatrick Patrick Hough, Maryam Jafri, Emilio Moreno, Laura Mulvey & Mark Lewis

In recent years, debates around iconoclasm have reentered the public consciousness, as countries around the world take steps to dismantle ethically ambiguous or ideologically contested artefacts. Examples include the Lenin statues in Ukraine, or the Confederate monuments in the United States.

When objects from the past sit uneasily with contemporary values, governments and individuals are faced with a choice—protect said monuments for future generations or remove them from public display. Either option comes with a myriad of political, social and ethical implications. Object of Doubt seeks to engage in these debates, presenting a variety of works by artists whose practices interrogate the ownership, preservation and destruction of artworks and cultural heritage.

Works include Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis’ 1993 film Disgraced Monuments, which uses rare archival footage and interviews with artists, art historians, and museum directors to examine the fate of Soviet-era monuments through successive political regimes. As well as Maryam Jafri’s Getty vs Ghana (2012) —originally commissioned for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015 —which explores the foreign ownership of national heritage in the context of copyright and digitisation.

A new work by Jamie Fitzpatrick continues the artist’s use of patriarchal depictions of masculinity and nationhood to undermine them and render them absurd, while Aleksandra Domanovic’s Portrait (bump map) (2011) highlights how easily history can be altered through the manipulation of its material record.

Coinciding with the projected date for Britain to leave the European Union, Object of Doubt questions the formation and memorialisation of national identity. It highlights the longevity of ideology versus the longevity of material, as well as the potential to transform history through transforming the objects that record it.

The Yellowing, Part 2 (Bell Mouth) is a new audio-visual performance, that brings the architecture and history of the Swiss Church into dialogue with the current life of a bell mouth intersection on the A583 in Lancashire. This bell mouth, as the gateway to a fracking site has, over the past two years, become inhabited as a place of reflection, action and togetherness.
 
The performance takes as its starting point the history of female social support work at the Swiss Church. This it connects to the activities in the bell mouth on Preston New Road, Lancashire, where the local community, particularly many older women, have held vigil since the fracking commenced in January 2017. During these two years, the site has played host to silent contemplation, knitting circles, speeches and song and dance, against a backdrop of frequently violent intervention from the police and security staff.
 
The performance will extend methods used in Birch’s previous performances— video, live narration and projected drawing— to recount a narrative that will gradually transform the architecture of the Church through projections, audio narration and objects. Starting from the histories of church and bell mouth, it will bring together stories of women from across the UK who take highly political actions, coming to them quietly, but with great determination. For many of these women, these activities are their first active political engagements, made late in life, and challenging their existing belief systems.
 
Refreshments will be served in the foyer throughout the evening.
 
Performances will take place every hour between 5.15 and 9pm. Admission is free but please book here if you would like to guarantee entry for a particular time slot (5.15pm, 6.15pm, 7.15pm and 8.15pm).
 
 
The Yellowing, Part 2 (Bell Mouth) is a chapter in Birch's wider project, The Yellowing, which connects women’s histories, landscapes and sub-surface geologies. The Yellowing, Part 1 was shown in May 2018 at The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, as part of Fig-Futures. The project alsoincludes a forthcoming feature-length film, Undermine, that follows the daily lives of the community of women affected by fracking in Lancashire, investigating the psychological implications of being undermined, environmentally, democratically and emotionally.
 
The Yellowing, Part 1 was commissioned by Fig-Futures, and supported by Art Fund, Arts Council England and Outset. The sister feature film currently in development, Undermine, has been supported by Arts Council England, FLAMIN (New Approaches) and Lancaster Arts.

In 1916, the British artist, playwright and actress Mina Loy wrote a one-page play entitled Collision—an innovative piece of writing, composed mainly of stage directions, describing the transformation of an interior by a machine and a single character known simply as “Man". The play is significant as it is, as academic Julie Schmid writes in her essay Mina Loy’s Futurist Theatre (1996), “one of the only feminist responses to and re-workings of the futurist dramatic aesthetic”. However, while Loy enjoyed relative recognition in her lifetime, she has largely been overlooked by the mainstream artistic canon until recently.
 
Melissa Gordon’s enactments of Collision are the first known stagings of Loy’s play. The first performance was during the exhibition Fallible Space, at the Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2016 on Collision’s centenary. At the Swiss Church, Gordon will work with the same group of corporeal mimes to manipulate a set she has designed, built and painted, which assembles itself into a large abstract painting. The mimes physically construct the painting with their own gestures, pulling, lifting and pushing to arrange prop-like gestural forms Gordon has fabricated. For Gordon, Loy’s play is a feminist imagining of modern space from 1916: a kinetic zone where bodies and objects are props in an unstable architecture, offering up endless possibilities to this day. The mimes will be activated by sound made by Morten Norbye Halvorsen and Chris Evans.
 
Gordon’s practice is primarily paintings and silkscreens that deal with the relation of a body to paint, and is focused on the language and politics of gesture. Her work has often confronted and challenged the canonical view of Modern art. This performance is no exception, attempting to introduce a lesser known work by a female artist to contemporary audiences and highlighting corporeal mime as a forgotten modernist language—a discipline which greatly influenced modern dance and theatre.
 
The performance at the Swiss Church marks the launch of a new publication celebrating Gordon’s Collision, featuring an introduction by Marie-Anne McQuay (Head of Programme, Bluecoat), an interview with corporeal mime Rita Pulga and an essay by curator Kirsty White. It will be available to purchase for a special price of £5 on the night.
 
Collision was first commissioned by the Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2016, with support from The Elephant Trust.

An evening of performance works by Romany Dear
 
In this evening of performances Glasgow-based artist Romany Dear will present her new work, Two fisted, many sided, tuna fem (2018), and a new variation of her ongoing work Solo Yolo (2015-ongoing). The works continue the artist’s ongoing interests into dance as both a practice of collectivity and social action.
 
Two fisted, many sided, tuna fem is a solo work that Dear developed during her time in Colombia, where she taught dance in Bogota. Reworked and translated for this sharing, the work explores the body and identity as questionable constructs. Dear reads aloud a letter she has written to herself, using a loop pedal, microphone and parts of a recorded track. The artist’s movements and layering of verbal and non-verbal language highlight the dualities, contradictions and in-between spaces that exist within gender. It presents a constellation of multiple and unstable positions that make visible the many selves or sides that we inhabit—including our so-called ‘masculine’ and/ or ‘feminine’ sides, as well as what is created when those sides are conversing/ queering. It is a reciprocal love letter from body to body.
 
Variations on Solo Yolo (we still have many lives left to dance) explores authorship, collaboration and autonomy in performance. Part of the work takes the structure of a game—a strategy the artist learnt from a week-long intensive with dancer and choreographer Alice Chauchat—and involves a changing set of parameters that are devised collectively by the dancers during the performance. These are assimilated by the dance, and consequently propose and dictate the movements and actions of the group. Dear says about the work:

LOUISA FAIRCLOUGH & RICHARD GLOVER
Friday 24 November, 9pm-12am
Please come and go as you wish or stay for the duration

VOICE IMAGES is a new choral composition that responds to the unique architecture and acoustics of the Swiss Church in London. Devised for an ensemble of six singers, it incorporates three distinct compositions or ‘voice-images’; sonic representations of delirium. Each ‘voice-image’ is designed to be modular — in conversation harmonically and timbrally with one another — and plays with a different cluster of words which sound alike yet shift in meaning with the change of a vowel or consonant. During the performance up to three compositions will occur simultaneously: from the quiet incisive sonority of two singers performing a duet to the polyphonic harmonies of several compositions occurring at one time. The intensity and audible perceptibility of these pieces will transform throughout, altered by the singers’ movement and proximity to each other within the space.
 
VOICE IMAGES builds on Louisa Fairclough’s solo exhibition, Ground Truth, at Danielle Arnaud Gallery in 2011. The show included two 16mm film installations: Bore Song (2011) and Song of Grief (2013), which formed a minor sixth interval when heard together. This tonal, as well as aesthetic, resonance led Fairclough to consider the works as modular, correlating with Glover’s interest in the perception of repeated musical intervals.

Glover and Fairclough have collaborated on a number of compositions since 2014 including Awkward Relaxed (2014), I wish I could be a stone (2014) and Compositions for a Low Tide (2014), as well as two expanded film installations: Can People See Me Swallowing (2014) and Absolute Pitch (2014). This is the first time they have expanded their research into tonal modularity into a live choral manifestation.

VOICE IMAGES has been workshopped with, and will be performed by the Dieci Voices — a professional vocal ensemble based in London.

In conjunction with the performance, Fairclough is presenting A Song Cycle for the Ruins of a Psychiatric Hospital, a solo exhibition at Danielle Arnaud Gallery 10 November — 9 December 2017.

In Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play, Doctor Faustus, the title character is a fabled scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life. He makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.

For his exhibition at the Swiss Church in London, Glasgow-based typographer Edwin Pickstone has taken Marlowe’s play as his subject; deconstructing the text so that each of its 12,247 words is isolated and printed on its own page. Carpeting the floor of the main hall, these pages, or flyers, transform what is a weighty text in both content and historical significance to ephemera. The installation thus explores the value of print — how the choice of printing method, surface and print run effects how an object is read, appreciated and valued.

Mirroring the narrative of the play, the text has been processed through a custom written software that progressively distorts the shape of the words. Pickstone likens this to making a ‘pact’ with the program, as he forsakes his control over the end product to pre-set parameters. (In a similar way Faust surrendered his soul to the Devil with little idea of the consequences.) In essence, Pickstone points out, this is our relationship with modern communication technologies — we readily use smart phones, tablets and laptops without knowing their long term affect on human relationships, behaviours and bodies.

The choice of the play was influenced by the installation’s context: the Swiss Church is spiritually rooted in the Swiss Reformation. The play’s emphasis on independent learning and the sin of pride links it to the Protestant Reformation — the schism from the Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther — that marks its 500th anniversary in 2017. Characterised by the rejection of religious images and icons, the period saw the destruction of thousands of iconographic books and artefacts. In conjunction, the development of the printing press at this time gave rise to the spread of written propaganda throughout Europe that caused new ideas, thoughts, and doctrine to be made available to the public. Pickstone’s installation expands on these two contradictory impulses — one to destroy and the other to disseminate — and takes the title of Biblioclasm, meaning the extreme criticism or destruction of books.


Upstairs, the nod towards iconoclasm continues with a number of prints and artist’s books. 1 gram of black ink squared (2011), is a print that represents the surface area a gram of ink occupies on a page of white paper. Its sister work, the artist’s book 1 kilo of black ink cubed (2017) extends this proposition to a kilogram. Aesthetically, the works are reminiscent of Malevich’s Black Square (1913), arguably the first work to abandon any attempt at pictorial representation (Malevich believed that through abstraction he could represent the “divine in its purest form accessible”).¹ Whilst Pickstone’s works concern mathematics and units of measurement rather than spirituality, they are similar to the Russian Suprematist’s in the demand they place on their viewer/reader. A certain degree of imagination is required to visualise the cube of black ink represented by 1 kilo of black ink cubed — like reading a novel, the book’s pages can only take one so far.

In a similar way The Components of War and Peace (2013) quantifies the ingredients required to print a Penguin paperback edition of Tolstoy’s novel. Comprising 671 sheets of paper and 16.3g of ink, the work seeks to question the importance of the physical object in the context of digital technologies. If one can store seemingly unlimited amounts of information in the ‘cloud,’ what is significant about the printed work — its material components?

 
Read the review of the exhibition by writer Ewan King for Art and Christianity, Winter 2017 here.

LEONOR SERRANO RIVAS
May 2017 – May 2018

From May 2017 to May 2018, Leonor Serrano Rivas is developing an ambitious research project at the Swiss Church. It includes a film shot in the Church entitled The dream follows the mouth (of the one who interprets it) (currently in post-production), and a public workshop, The Castle of Crossed Destinies that took place in July 2017.

These two connected projects bookend the first year of continuous artistic programming at the Church — the film is scheduled to be screened in May 2018. They evolve from Serrano Rivas’ interest in the intersection between live action scenes, the spectator and the spatiality of theatre, and are characterised by an aesthetic that marries medieval with ancient Greek.

The dream follows the mouth (of the one who interprets it) is Serrano Rivas’ most ambitious project to date. Made with the help of 4 dancers, a glass harpist, an organist and a cinematographer, it considers the influence that architecture has on activities that exist within, or in relation to it. Unfolding through a series of dramatic scenes that use the mirrored surfaces of the Church to confuse reality with reflection, the film attempts to depict a subconscious world in which the Church plays the main character.

Playing with similar themes, the workshop The Castle of Crossed Destinies invited viewers to enter the set and narrative of The dream follows the mouth… Like the novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino from which the event took its title, viewers were encouraged to find non-verbal means to navigate a series of encounters with the film’s performers, reconstructing for themselves the film’s script. The event was accompanied by a breakfast, inspired by The dream follows the mouth…, cooked by artist Nora Silva.

The dream follows the mouth (of the one who interprets it) will be presented at The Botín Foundation, Santander in January 2018 and the Swiss Church in London in 2018.