For the Summer Chisenhale Gallery hosts 27 Senses, an exhibition curated by Lina Dzuverovic and produced by Electra. 27 Senses is a group exhibition arriving at Chisenhale from the Norwegian fjords, based around the participating artists' investigation into a forgotten moment in the life of seminal artist Kurt Schwitters.

Emerging out of a research trip in 2007 to the Schwitters Hütte - a small Merzbau-like structure on the remote island of Hjertøya that the artist inhabited and transformed during his exile from Germany in the 1930s, the project developed in close dialogue with a unique site. Yet in its own subjective and heavily abstracted way, 27 Senses stretches beyond locality and speaks also of the very abandonment of a place. In focus here is the idea of stopping and starting, the notion that Schwitters was forced to rebuild his life (and the Merzbau) several times due to the political situation that led to his exile from Germany to Norway and subsequently to the UK. The geopolitical conditions the artist had to navigate continuously induced as well as restricted movement, making the relationship with place fluid and temporary.

Ideas of leaving behind and starting anew remain central to the new incarnation of 27 Senses, a move that coincides with Schwitters' own journey from Norway to the UK in the summer of 1940. This transition is one where the artists involved in the first chapter of the exhibition will continue their dialogue with Schwitters in ways that stretch beyond historical specificity to a more intuitive and personal engagement with both a specific place and movement away from locality. This includes a new commission by Norwegian artist Eline McGeorge, an installation which plays with the organic, multilayered and collage-like structure of the Schwitters' Hütte. Deliberately breaking up 90 degree angles and disrupting the angularity of the white cube, the installation re-introduces an enveloping environment, as the gallery itself becomes a form of Merzbau structure. Enveloping the viewer, the installation continues a dialogue with Schwitters' desire to collapse the barrier between art and life in an enveloping experience similar to that of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, yet in a more quiet and subtle language. Visitors to McGeorge's Hütte in London will have a markedly different experience, and yet the work ties back, by extended links of kinship to Hjertøya and its crooked structure. This simultaneous conversation with movement, with taking a remnant and starting anew is something that links together the two shows, just as it, significantly, tied Schwitters' eclectic and nomadic practice together.

Schwitters' eclectic practice spanned across painting, immersive installation, performance, sound poetry, typography, collage and sculpture and has had a crucial, but often overlooked, influence on contemporary artistic and performative practices. 27 Senses takes the form of an exhibition and performance programme, investigating how certain ideas central to Schwitters' oeuvre are manifesting themselves today across the visual arts, performance and sound based practices.

The first stage of 27 Senses took place in the summer of 2007 in the form of a visit to the region by the selected artists. This research trip served as an initial on-site exploration of the presence of Schwitters in the area, and as a basis for the creation of site- specific works. 27 Senses at Chisenhale is the third stage of the project, following the exhibion at Kunstmuseet KUBE in 2009.

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Right Right Now Now

Ausstellung vom 12. Juni bis 22. August 2010
Eröffnung: Samstag, 12. Juni, 14.30 Uhr

Die Ausstellung Right Right Now Now befasst sich mit künstlerischen Positionen, die an journalistische, soziologische und wissenschaftliche Formate und Strategien anknüpfen, sich diese jedoch nicht aneignen, sondern vielmehr eigene Ästhetiken für die Beschreibung von Welt entwickeln. Es stehen dabei Arbeiten im Mittelpunkt, die historische Ereignisse nachzeichnen sowie soziale oder kulturelle Zusammenhänge beschreiben, aber stets einen klassischen analytischen Weg der Formulierung vermeiden.

Mit dieser Ausstellung soll die Frage gestellt werden, welcher Mehrwert aus einer künstlerischen Sprache gewonnen werden kann. Die Ausstellung ist ein Plädoyer für narrative und subjektive Ausdrucksformen. Das Potential der vorgestellten künstlerischen Positionen liegt in ihrem subjektiven, oft obsessiven Blick. Indem die Künstler vermeintliche Marginalien, unbeachtete Details oder ausgewählte Persönlichkeiten in die konzentrierte Aufmerksamkeit rücken, eröffnen sie neue Perspektiven auf Bekanntes. Sie entwickeln unabhängige Sprachen und machen dadurch Geschichte wie auch Gegenwart aus subjektiver Perspektive zugänglich.

Kuratiert von Katja Schroeder

WM.1: Public Viewing im M.1
Alle Deutschlandspiele, Viertelfinale, Halbfinale und Finale

Wenn Sie zur Eröffnung mit dem Zug aus Hamburg oder Berlin anreisen, steht um 14.00 und um 15.20 ein Shuttle zum M.1 am Bahnhof Itzehoe bereit. Um 16.10 und um 17.10 bringt Sie ein Shuttle vom M.1 zum Bahnhof Itzehoe.
Anmeldung: buero@arthurboskamp-stiftung.de

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1st of May event at Hit.

Reading from 'Manual' with animation.

rehearsal of the reading with Sofia Bresland at Hit, Göteborg, Sweden

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contribution to the spring issue 2010 of NOWISWERE:

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What is to be said?

presents an evening within an exhibition by Eline McGeorge at Hollybush Gardens
5 November, 7 pm

A reading from Manual (2009), an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge, designed by åbäke,
read by Oreet Ashery and Edd Hobbs.

Plus
a screening of two films by Maja Borg:
Ottica Zero (2007) 13 mins;
Construct (Two Moments in Beauty) (2006) 8 mins.

What is to be said? is a year-long programme of events, seminars and texts curated by Malin Ståhl.

Documentation of What is to be said? performance. Oreet Ashery and Edd Hobbs

reading from 'Manual' by Eline McGeorge. November 2009

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A solo show by Eline McGeorge

Private View Thursday 17 September 7 - 9 pm
Exhibition open from 18 Sept - 25 Oct
Gallery open from Thursday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm

Hollybush Gardens presents a new animation and installation by Eline McGeorge, incorporating several distinct elements; an animation, a soundscape and an artist’s book.

Installed within a wooden structure, the animation Manual Trailer, is a collage of drawings, found photographs, text and video. These elements operate as a series of sequences, guiding one to spaces not easily defined. In one sequence a newspaper misprint collides a forest and portrait of a woman.
It is a film still, reminiscent of female actors from the by gone era of the silver screen. Her features are obscured by an overlay of drawn animation shining through her face. Following on is some footage of an eclipse - reversing the movements of the clouds, this clip has been manipulated and might suggest surveillance or some kind of zooming in on a far away object. This greyscale world places one in an unrecognisable landscape, pushing us between images that seem to suggest the indeterminate area and conditions of a borderland.

Manual Soundtrack is made with DJ and sound designer Angie Anderson. Streamed into the room, it sits somewhere between a sound piece and background music.
McGeorge says
”I wanted some kind of half abstract but still recognizable sound, preferably sourced from the 'real world' rather than digitally generated. I wanted sound that was distorted, but in an analogue and 'real life' way. Sound warped by for example wind and rain entering or touching the microphone, the white noise between channels on the radio, a needle scratching a record. The more ‘musical’ fragments in the piece are composed of a melody that Anderson learnt to play on the piano as a child. Anderson is tentatively playing the melody that she once knew - here the passing of time and an unclear memory produces the distortion.

The sound is constructed in a similar way to the animation - layered with repetitions and variations and then looped. The two are not made to be synchronised, not made to illustrate one another - but to accompany each other and affect one another equally. There is a difference in length, the sound piece being slightly longer than the animation, leading to endlessly new and random relations between image and sound.

A third element, Manual is an artist’s book that co-exists with the animation and the sound piece. Manual includes a story that bounces between abstract passages and clear cut narrative. We might be set in the future, and the story deals with the implication of digital technology, social structures and conventions as well as the manipulation of information and politics. It could be said that the protagonist is a subject in process and or crisis - trying to adapt to conditions that we may recognise from our day to day.

As with both other elements, the story weaves reality and abstraction; emerging from an engagement with the subject of being placed within a culture, a political system, a language, that may not feel like home. In McGeorge’s work, the interplay between forms produces a hybrid experimentation where the animation, sound piece and book all make an appearance across one another. The muted appearance of a cloud producing the most significant progress of all, that which allows the heroine to finally communicate home.

Eline McGeorge lives and works in London and Berlin. Previous shows include: Participation in Momentum Favoured Nations, Moss, Norway, 2009, 27 Senses, Kube, Kunstmuseum, Ålesund, Norway, 2009, Travelling Doubles II, Kirkoff, Copenhagen, 2008, Amongst Familiar Strangers and Surveilled Places, Fotogalleriet, Oslo, 2007.

Manual, 2009 by Eline McGeorge is published by Dent-De-Leone Press (www.dentdeleone.co.nz) ISBN number: 978-0-9561885-4-0
Designed by åbäke, Softcover, 80 pages, 24 cm x 17 cm, Produced by Momentum, Moss, Norway.

Our new initiative Critical Acts will stage a series of events during the show, please check wwww.hollybushgardens.co.uk for details.

The gallery will be open until 9 pm on Saturday 17 October as part of Frieze Art Fair East End Gallery Night.

Hollybush Gardens will be participating at Frieze Art Fair, October 15 - 18, Booth F19.

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MOMENTUM 2009
5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art
Favoured Nations
29 August - 18 October 2009
Moss
Norway

http://www.momentum.no/

Catalogue text written by Lina Dzuverovic for the Momentum catalogue:

Eline McGeorge’s work revolves around distorted places, spaces and characters and travel or navigation across them. Through abstraction and fragmented portrayal of these locations and characters, the artist engages with the politics and psychology that governs them. Individual titles of McGeorge’s works such as ‘Travelling Doubles’, ‘Ontological Candidate, Navigator’, ‘Departure of a Stranger’, ‘Among Familiar Strangers and Surveilled Spaces’, ‘Resumed Arrival’, ‘Possibility of Another Place’ and others often underline these concerns. For McGeroge, a turn to the non-figurative is a way to come to terms with other forms of abstraction - a way to describe and enter political, philosophical and psychological concepts.

McGeorge’s installations combine works across a range media including drawing, collage, montage, posters, photographs and sculptures. These elements function as fragments which are in dialogue with each other.

McGeorge’s work in Favoured Nations is centered around a script which doubles up as a voiceover in the animation and a printed publication available to be read in the space. The animation forms the central point of an environment which also includes a number of posters, works on paper and sculptures.

The animation and the script revolve around a loose narrative set in a ‘zone’ in which borders separate and restrict the movements of the main character, who in turn, makes attempts to find a way out. The zone is strictly governed and politicized and maps out the mental space of the character. The character’s travel out of the zone is related to her opposition to the commodified political, psychological, ideological and social setting the zone imposes on its residents. The ‘other side’ of the crossing is an unknown topography, and through her laptop, the character tries to navigate into this zone and find information she thinks is lost or censored. The story revolves around her attempts to communicate across the zone’s firewall, the compatibility problems with the computer systems outside the zone, her recovery from hypothermia, altitude sickness, uprooted-ness and the breakdown of communication technology that also separates her from a troubled relationship (to her own past and/or to other people) inside the zone.

Her political dissidence, activist work and troubled personal relationships become mixed with the reality of incompatible information ontologies and computer systems, blocked digital information and unreliable communication technology. The separation in time and space depends more on the barriers of digital technology and its function/dysfunction and a mixed up mental account of her relations in the zone constructed in her feverish recovery, than on the actual distance she has traveled.

The work cross-references the parallel use of the term ontology in both philosophy and computer technology, and refers to cognitive estrangement in science fiction theory.There are suggestions to a situation where information technology and the Internet both allow true democracy and the true police state, and where the freedom of speech also allows words to loose a sense of actuality.

Eline McGeorge was born in Oslo, Norway in 1970 and currently lives and works in Berlin and London.

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27 Senses

Kunstmuseet KUBE
Apotekergata 16
N-6004 Ålesund
Norway
www.electra-productions.com

27 Senses

Kenneth Goldsmith/ UbuWeb, Carl Michael von Hausswolff/ Selmer Nilsen, Karl Holmqvist, Jutta Koether, Eline McGeorge

Curated by Lina Dzuverovic (Electra)

25 April - 27 June 2009

Kunstmuseet KUBE
Apotekergata 16
N-6004 Ålesund
Norway

27 Senses takes as the point of departure the life and work of seminal artist Kurt Schwitters, who spent many years in the area of Møre and Romsdal in Norway during his exile from Germany in the 1930s. Much of his time was spent on the island of Hjertøya near Molde where he lived and worked in a summer hut, now named Schwitters Hütte. 27 Senses is the first contemporary art exhibition to solely engage with the time Schwitters spent in Norway. The project delves into this particular moment in the local history as the selected artists investigate the geopolitical conditions Schwitters had to navigate during these years. In particular, the focus is on the idea of stopping and starting, the notion that Schwitters was forced to rebuild his life (and the Merzbau) several times due to the political situation that led to his exile from Germany to Norway and subsequently to the UK.

Schwitters' eclectic practice spanned across painting, immersive installation, performance, sound poetry, typography, collage and sculpture and has had a crucial, but often overlooked, influence on contemporary artistic and performative practices. 27 Senses takes the form of an exhibition and performance programme, investigating how certain ideas central to Schwitters' oeuvre are manifesting themselves today across the visual arts, performance and sound based practices.

The first stage of 27 Senses took place in the summer of 2007 in the form of a visit to the region by the selected artists. This research trip served as an initial on-site exploration of the presence of Schwitters in the area, and as a basis for the creation of site- specific works. With this context-sensitive orientation in mind, the exhibition will begin with a day of performances around the Schwitters' Hütte located on the island of Hjertøya, not usually open to the public. The hut is covered in Schwitters' collages, small handwritten notes on the walls and the beginning of a Merzbau-like structure along one of the walls. In this way those attending the performance day will not only get a sense of the location but will uniquely be able to access this normally inaccessible breathtaking piece of art history.

The title, 27 Senses comes from the opening line of Schwitters' Merz love poem An Anna Blume. In it Schwitters alludes to the five senses not being enough to describe the object of his desire. This notion of synesthetic experience carries through all of Schwitters' works and is manifested in his wish for Merz 'to create connections, preferably between everything in this world'. In his quest for an experience not unlike a Wagnerian Gesamtkunswerk, Schwitters longed for all of his works to be perceived as one lifelike experience.

It is precisely such an experience that 27 Senses seeks to create through combining the exploration of the local area with the works in the museum. This sense of unity of art and life is central to the show and therefore we aim for the '27 Senses experience' to begin upon one's arrival to the performance day at Hjertøya, rather than upon one's entrance into the museum.

About the Artists:

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and the founding editor of UbuWeb, a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material. He teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and hosts a weekly radio show at WFMU. Goldsmith has had many books of poetry published including his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic, (2007) and Sports, (2008), and is Senior Editor of PENNsound.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff has worked with Electra previously on The Trans-Communication Lab (2006). He is a composer, visual artist and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. His main tools are recording devices (camera, tape deck, radar, sonar) used in an ongoing investigation of electricity, frequency, architectural space and paranormal electronic interference. He is an expert in the work of Friedrich Jurgenson, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) a researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Major exhibitions include Portikus, Frankfurt (2004), the Venice Biennale (2001, 2003 and 2005), Sound Art - Sound As Media Tokyo ICC (2000), documenta X (1997) and the Johannesburg Biennial (1997). Hausswolff received a Prix Ars Electronica award for Digital Musics in 2002. He is the curator and producer of freq_out.

Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist mostly works with text material, publications and readings in which he deals with the ethics and aesthetics of issues such as politics and religion. The resulting gallery based installations of his work are usually minimal and functional; boxes of published texts, computers and listening stations. He also participates in concert-style presentations and has released CDs and 7" vinyls of his spoken work, including Make It Happen, a compilation of young Swedish artists by the record label of the same name. He has had solo and group exhibitions internationally, including GÅVÄNTASTANNAÕ (GOWAITSTOP), Sweden (2006); Performa, Switzerland (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof (2004), KW (2001), both Berlin; Galleri Index (2003) and Kulturhuset (2002), both Stockholm; and Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale (2003).

Jutta Koether worked with Electra in 2005 on Her Noise, collaborating with Kim Gordon on the newly commissioned piece Reverse Karaoke. Jutta Koether is a German born painter, performance artist, musician, writer and theoretician based in New York. She has had solo exhibitions across Europe and the US including Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Akademie Der Bildenden Künste in Vienna as well as partaking in numerous group shows internationally. She regularly contributes to publications such as Artforum and Afterall and is the former editor of German culture and music publication Spex.

Born in Norway, Eline McGeorge graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 2000. Her work is drawing-based, using collages, montages, sculptures and animated drawing. Travelling Doubles 2 was her first solo show in Denmark in 2008; previous solo shows include Fotogalleriet, Norway (2007); Hollybush Gardens, London (2007 and 2005) and Possibilities of Another Place, Display Gallery, Prague (2004). Group exhibitions include Berliner Kunstsalon, (2004 and 2005); B Hotel at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2001/2); Break in Theatre 2 (touring major spaces in Japan) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2001.

Travel Information:

Kunstmuseet KUBE is located in Ålesund, a town on the fringe of the Norwegian "Geiranger" fjord. SAS flies directly to Ålesund Airport from numerous destinations and from there it is a short bus/ taxi ride into the town centre. The museum itself is situated on the waterfront in the town's central harbour area, on Apotekargatan 16 which can be found here.

On the very same road is the Clarion Collection Hotel Bryggen , a comfortable, sauna-equipped hotel with excellent service. Whilst being in the area, it is very worth visiting the island of Hjertøya where Schwitters spent his summers and where the remarkable Schwitters' Hütte is located. The island can be accessed by boat from Molde with frequent departures from mid-town during the summer.

Please do not hesitate to contact Electra, fatima@electra-productions.com if you have any enquiries about the exhibition or surrounding practical details.

Image: Simon Wågsholm