Louise Benson

Art and design writer. Editor-at-Large at POSTmatter. [email protected]

[louisebenson]

Interview with Camille Henrot, POSTmatter, 2016

When I was a child, I think aged about 8 or 9, I developed a fascination with story books that offered alternate endings. Amidst their pages, I experienced a rare sense of responsibility. While I wielded my newly-found power solely over fictional characters, my sense of personal agency felt very real. Unlike most things that I encountered – what we would eat for dinner, when I would do my homework, what time I would go to bed – nothing in the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books was set in stone. Reading them brought the rest of the world into question. And under scrutiny, the messiness of everyday life quickly became apparent. What had previously seemed solid - seemed certain - became soft and malleable. Stepping into ‘The Pale Fox’, a blue-painted room filled by French artist Camille Henrot with assorted objects, sketches and sculptures two years ago, I was reminded of this early impulse to ask simply, “Why this, and not that?” It is a question that runs throughout Henrot’s work.

The array of objects displayed in ‘The Pale Fox’, her 2014 commission at the Chisenhale Gallery, do not allow for easy categorisation. Like ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013), that won Henrot the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale for most promising young artist, layer upon layer of information is built up to the point of sensory overload. In both, connections are drawn across cultural customs, time periods and belief systems. East and west; ancient and modern; science and religion. For ‘Grosse Fatigue’, Henrot spent time in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, drawing upon its immense archive to create a film that attempts to tell the epic history of the universe from the desktop of a computer. It is an impossible task scaled down to the familiar aspect of the web browser, from creation myth to Wikipedia entry.

Read the rest of the interview in POSTmatter here. 

[louisebenson]

Gallery text for Lorena Lohr, Claire de Rouen, 2016-17

Strangeness and familiarity come together in the photographs of Canadian-British Lorena Lohr. Travelling around the American Southwest by train, Greyhound bus and on foot periodically since 2010, her journey through nameless streets and forgotten highways is documented in the ongoing series ‘Ocean Sands’. Fleeting landscapes and unexpected moments stand still as she passes through each new place, caught in her pictures of the bars, motels and suburban houses that she encounters. The experience of the unknown, together with the heightened sensations of both wonderment and fear that come with it, is embraced in Lohr’s focus on the neglected interiors and faded facades that populate much of America. By casting her eye on their overlooked details, she shows what it means to see even the most ubiquitous of spaces with unfamiliar eyes, serving as a continual reminder of her own status as a visitor.

Lohr travels alone, and her pictures are – for the most part – devoid of people. Instead, an alternative portrait of the individuals who populate these spaces is built up through the traces that they leave behind. The chair recently vacated, the half-finished drink, the empty driveway or the back door left ajar. The more deliberate markers and signs that remain within a place also intrigue Lohr. Representations of palm trees, galloping horses, seashells, dramatic sunsets and birds of paradise appear on motel and cocktail bar fronts and painted wall murals, sun- bleached memorabilia, carpeted floors and furnishings. Recurring motifs in her study of the layered histories of vernacular space, they suggest at once the allure of the exotic and the sadness of unfulfilled dreams. An undercurrent of desire, aspiration and loneliness emerges, as fantasy and reality intermingle in her framing of surfaces and textures.

Read in full here: http://www.lorenalohr.com/about/

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Monthly digital art commissions, 2014 - 2016

I oversaw a digital residency series on POSTmatter from 2014 to 2016, commissioning artists and working with moving image, animation and other digital formats to create a daily piece over the course of a month. 12 online exhibitions are hosted a year. I’ve also worked with partners including Mubi, Taschen and Dover Street Market for month-long shows as part of the initiative.

 Sam Coldy: 

Taschen: 

Tata & Friends: 

Dominic Hawgood: 

Chris Marker tribute with Mubi:

Daata Editions: 

Ari Weinkle:

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Interview with Eddie Peake, Elephant Magazine, Winter 2015

“Everyone has experienced the weirdness of when you do a social event and have people from different groups coming together—the friends you knew when you were a child, your friends from university, your friends from work,’ Eddie Peake is telling me over Saturday lunch in Soho, a few days before Frieze London gets under way. ‘Sometimes it works, or else they don’t get on at all.’

Peake’s latest solo show, The Forever Loop, commissioned for the Barbican’s Curve, has opened just two nights earlier. ‘I have that a lot with my work, which I think of not only as an epicentre of different visual languages, but also of different people. In the end I do think that it works out harmoniously and excitingly, but it can be uncomfortable.’ We’re at the Stockpot, a London institution whose faded décor and muted playlist of 80s hits make the inclusion on their menu of classics such as liver and bacon, prawn cocktail and apple crumble seem decidedly less incongruous. Long-standing regulars and down-and-out chancers commune, offering a glimpse of London’s diversity that remains as much alive here as it does in Peake’s work.

Full interview published in Elephant Magazine, Winter 2015.

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fig-2 exhibition at ICA Studio

As part of the fig-2 programme, I curated an exhibition that explored shifting relationships to the natural landscape in a digital age, bringing together photography, sound and video works in a setting inspired by Marcel Brodthaers’ ‘Jardin en Hiver’. I invited artists, writers and critics to participate in live writing events and global web chats, looking at the ways in which a digital magazine could fit within a physical space. An accompanying book will be released this year. 

Exhibited at the ICA Studio and on POSTmatter, July 2015. More information, including me discussing the show with Fatos Ustek for the fig-2 podcast, here. 

[louisebenson]

How Emoji Conquered The World, Protein Journal, 2015

It’s a familiar situation – you’re trying to organise a night out but everyone in your WhatsApp group is coming up with a different place or time to meet. Plus you have a hundred other emails to answer, notifications are popping up and a meeting’s about to start. Instead of a lengthy reply, you send a 👍 to one person’s suggestion of dinner. This is the age of constant connection – and distraction. Emails, Instagram, Skype and Facebook all make it easy to stay in touch with a wide network of friends, yet the time required to actively maintain these links is often lacking. Enter emoji. Simple, fast and increasingly ubiquitous, emoji offer an immediate point of communication. Take the dinner confirmation, for example: you can make yourself clear without typing a single word. This is a widespread phenomenon. 

Emojitracker, a website that shows real-time emoji use on Twitter, gives an insight into their overwhelming popularity: its tallies of hearts, crying faces and pizza slices reach the millions. Emoji are becoming embedded into popular culture, from the full translation of Moby Dick into Emoji Dick to Drake’s praying hands tattoo, and they have even extended into broader societal issues. The success of the long-standing campaign for greater racial diversity in the emoji spectrum resulted in a major Apple update in April 2015, signalling a transition from frivolous smileys to a more legitimate mode of communication. Instagram, which has used emoji since its launch, recently introduced the use of emoji in hashtags. According to the company, 40% of all photo captions posted to the platform now contain at least one emoji, an increase from around 20% in 2012-2013. “It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language,” says Thomas Dimson, a software engineer on Instagram’s data team, in a company blog post. “Emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages.” The rise of Instagram itself as a wordless means of expression is indicative of the power of images, and emoji are able to harness this appeal across multiple mediums.

Published in Protein Journal. Read full piece online here. 

[louisebenson]

Interview with John Akomfrah

In the sprawling Giardini, it is easy to feel overwhelmed at the sheer volume of work on display. Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures’ brings together a remarkable collection of artists, weaving together rainbow-bright installation work with muted small-scale sculpture, and interactive performances with architectural models. The harsh realities of a globalised economy are brought to the fore as these threads entwine, amplifying the voices and materials that make up the world’s labour force. An often-overlooked underclass of workers is conjured, and the exhibition’s many modes of presentation become an urgent tool of communication and dissent. John Akomfrah’s latest work, embodies this focus on the unseen networks of production and distribution. Nestled in the heart of Enwezor’s Central Pavilion, layers of archive footage, text, sound and imagery shot by Akomfrah overlap to form a new narrative of human ambition, brutality, innovation and pain.

A whale moves gracefully forward upon the central screen as I enter Akomfrah’s darkened installation room, separated from the main exhibition by a heavy curtain. Where many other works in the Pavilion overlap, sharing rooms or projecting sound that carries even as you move across thresholds, Vertigo Sea inhabits its own domain. Akomfrah watched over 120 hours of natural history footage for the piece over a course of three and half months, building outwards from an initial meditation on Moby Dick. “I had been thinking about doing work based around the Melville novel for years, which is so full of these incredible philosophical speculations about our relations with the sea, and with each other. I had been trying to find ways that I could eviscerate it, and take out elements without directly referring to the novel,” he says.

As I watch, a harpoon strikes the whale and slowly halts its progress through the water. The waves run a vivid shade of red, and the pain of the animal is palpable as it writhes amidst the waves. The violence is shocking, the looming presence of a ship and its machinery alien amidst their expansive natural surroundings. “I had set off to do something about the 'aquatic sublime', as I called it, which is just the notion that you could have the sea as a landscape in which incredible beauty coexists which absolute terror. And so then the question was, what narratives could one find to substantiate this idea?” Akomfrah recalls. “Whaling is the maiming of the aquatic sublime par excellence. You've got these magnificent creatures: the oldest, the most intelligent on the planet, that are forced to live this incredible life of absolute brutality and horror with us, that has gone on for five centuries of mechanised, organised, systematic butchery.”

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here.

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Interview with Jonas Mekas

Racing through Venice’s labyrinthine backstreets and rickety wooden bridges, all while looking through a small hand-held camera, is no mean feat. Jonas Mekas has filmed his encounters with the world consistently over the past 70 or so years, and he isn’t about to stop now. He is 92 years old. To say that he has had a prolific career as an artist, filmmaker and poet would be an understatement. A leading figure of the American Avant-Garde film movement of the 20th Century, his impressionistic films heralded a movement far removed from the large-scale studios and big budgets of Hollywood. Instead, he looked to his friends in the artist communities of New York, from Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol, drawing directly upon his own life to build an intimate portrait of an era. The chance encounters and quotidian rhythms of the city keep pace in Mekas’ films, bringing something distinctly human to the anonymity of an unknown street corner or alleyway.

These records of public and personal life can be found at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, established by Mekas in 1970 to establish an archive of cinema, from past to present. Here, well-known works by pioneering directors such as Bill Viola and Stan Brakhage can be found alongside evocative home video footage open submissions, as Mekas continues his focus on the levelling effect of filmmaking and its tools. In Venice, this breaking down of the hierarchy between director and audience is taken forward. Mekas has chosen to situate his latest exhibition not in the grand palazzos or pavilions of the Biennale, but in Venice’s only Burger King. Titled The Internet Saga, it places Mekas’ work not only at the heart of the modern milieu of the city, but also at the centre of a thoroughly contemporary concern. Even as the online realm continues to integrate with the art world, the total assimilation of the internet into everyday life is already well established.

It is natural, then, that the internet would form a key focus of Mekas’ practice today. In 2007, he uploaded a daily video to his website for ‘The 365 Day Project’, while he has continued since to post regular videos of his encounters with friends, collaborators and his home city of New York.  Transported to Venice, Mekas has worked closely with curating team Francesco Urbano Ragazzi to embed decades of his work into the city, both at the Burger King location and at new gallery Zuecca Project Space. We meet as the Biennale gets underway, wandering away from the tourist hordes and towards the Burger King, where local teenagers and elderly folk eat their burgers and look on.

PM: To begin, what led you to situate part of the exhibition at Venice’s only Burger King? How did you devise the layout of the screens and transparencies throughout the space?

Jonas Mekas: Everything that is presented in the Burger King location was produced first for the internet: I had it on my website. Now, you have three different screens, each with a slightly different function. In 2007, I made one little film to put on the internet every day. That was my ‘365 Day Project’, which is now presented on one screen at Burger King, while another screen streams what I am still putting up daily. Every week I add one or two new moving image pieces, which are shown on a third screen. And then I’m using also the windows for transparencies, so it’s about using the space and transforming it into slightly something else. It’s all to honour, or celebrate, the simple place where normal people eat. It’s nothing to do with art; you just come and eat.

PM: This accessibility could also be used to describe the online world. What interests you about the internet itself, and specifically the experience of watching videos on streaming sites such as YouTube?

JM: Absolutely, the internet is the people’s medium. Everybody can use it, upload whatever they want, and exchange. It’s the same as Burger King, which is anormal people's eating-place. Anybody can go there. In all of my work I have been filming or videotaping normal and simple daily life. I am not interested in big events. I’m more interested in things that people don't even pay attention to. I’m interested in civilisation; culture.

PM: Do you see an avant-garde movement emerging through the new tools of the internet?

JM: Yes! There was The Birth of a Nation in 1915, and now we have the birth of the internet nation. Hollywood was very small and restrictive, it was a royalty nation. Then independent filmmakers came around, and it become more democratic and much wider, bigger and more free. Today, we are a step even further; now, we are all free.

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Interview with Isaac Julien

Amidst the remote glacial ice caves in the South West of Iceland, wild vistas and slopes are fragmenting. Craggy snow heaps and undulating shorelines meet the sharp geometry of cut panes of glass, spaced and set proudly upright amidst the landscape. At once transparent and reflective, they both frame and distort their surroundings. Isaac Julien’s latest film installation, Stones Against Diamonds, memorialises Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi upon the centenary of her death, enacting these tensions between the built and natural world.

Inspired by a letter that Bo Bardi wrote, Julien explores her love of semi-precious stones, believing them to be more beautiful than precious gemstones. Stones Against Diamonds takes a meditative focus on the appeal of alternative production methods in the face of conventional value systems. Materials are brought to the forefront, as glass and concrete are set amongst the shimmering whites of the Icelandic hinterland. Bo Bardi’s glass easels, whereby artworks could appear suspended amidst an exhibition space, are transported to nature. Here, the central fluidity and openness that characterised her approach to design are taken forward, whereby she frequently incorporated glass as a building material to dissolve the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Here, the easels become both solid intervention and fleeting apparition.

Julien traverses this central equilibrium through the guiding presence of Vanessa Myrie, a regular collaborator and performer in his films. She wanders on a journey that begins in Stones Against Diamonds, but will be continued next year in Italy and Brazil, as Julien works to complete the piece – to which this is the prelude. 

POSTmatter: Firstly, what drew you to Iceland as the setting and key foundation of ‘Stones Against Diamonds’?

Isaac Julien: I have filmed in Iceland other the last ten years. I made my first work there in 2004, called True North, and some may think that this new work is a redact version of that but actually it’s very different. Then I filmed again in 2014 for a work called Playtime that looked at the story of a friend of mine who lost his house during the Icelandic financial crash. So this work is the third time I have filmed in Iceland. I have always wanted to film in the ice caves but they are very precarious by nature, and only become available at certain times. I was told just before Christmas that this ice cave had actually come to fruition, so to speak, and therefore I decided to grab it, gain access to it and film it for Stones Against Diamonds.

PM: You have explored many different locations globally, and the next instalments of this work will be set in Brazil and Italy. What does the notion of travel mean to you in your films, and is there a collapsing of borders there? How do you connect up these places outside of their physical geography alone?

IJ: Well, you could say that in my own biography the question of geography is quite important because my parents came from the Caribbean to England. In that sense, I see my work as very much connected to movement and to different spaces. Those spaces usually mean different locations, and the location plays a very important role in the making of my works. Landscapes are almost characters or protagonists in a work.

In a work like Stones Against Diamonds, one of the main attractions to making a piece of work about Lina Bo Bardi is that she was an architect who was born in Italy, but went to Brazil and developed an aesthetic for the Latin American Modernist movement. Architecture is also one of my primary interests. So not only the location but also the actual space in her designs is very important.

All of these elements feed into my work, and to introduce that variety you have to move between different spaces and places and locations. Perhaps there is a visual ethnography to my work, but I see it as a critical one; one which has a certain relationship to visual difference and how that gets articulated and portrayed poetically in a work. These things are marked to my own life and my own autobiography, and they seep into my artistic practice.

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Reporting from the Venice Biennale 2015: Polish Pavilion

Poland’s pavilion was on the lips of many during the opening week of the Biennale. Selected through a contest for the official representation in Venice, artists C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska and curator Magdalena Moskalewicz undertook a major research journey into the village of Cazale, Haiti. The descendants of Polish soldiers who fought for the independence of Haiti in the early 1800s still remain here, united with their ancestors by a shared historical identity. The project directs this local community in a full-scale opera performance of Polish opera Halka, filmed and played in its entirety in Venice across a large-scale, curved screen.

While inspired by the mad plan of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo to construct an opera house in the Amazon, the piece is not without its criticism of colonialism. Questioning the notion of a fixed national identity in the 21st century, it connects geographically and culturally distinct communities through a newly collaborative, multi-media process. Epic and utterly absorbing, there were already rumours flying around Venice that it would be making a future transfer to The Tanks at the Tate Modern. Watch this space.

Published on POSTmatter. More of my reports from Venice can be read here. 

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A Family Portrait for The Gourmand

I wrote about my grandma’s restaurant for food, arts and culture journal The Gourmand. She opened Odin’s in the 60s in Marylebone, London, offering free meals in exchange for artworks. The walls quickly became lined with paintings by David Hockney, Patrick Procktor, Ron Kitaj and more. The restaurant sadly closed in 2012, and the paintings were auctioned off by the new owner. In the piece I remember Devonshire Street, watercolours, and it all going up in flames.

  Published in The Gourmand, Spring 2015.

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Interview with Charlotte Jarvis

A machine is whirring in the middle of a room in Limewharf, London, spurting glistening, soapy bubbles into the air. They float aimlessly, suspended for a few seconds before bursting. This is Charlotte Jarvis’ music recital, almost three years in the making, and yet I can’t hear any sound at all. Instead, the specially-composed piece by the Kreutzer Quartet has been encoded into DNA and suspended in soap solution. ‘POP’: visitors find themselves bathed in silent song, immersed in the ‘Music of the Spheres’. Adopted from Byron’s poem of the same name, Jarvis takes up his notion of a universal melody: “It’s underlying everything, all of creation. I saw parity between that and contemporary ideas of DNA as this universal code that underlies all of life, so I introduced the music and that was how it all started.”

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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A conversation on Ryoji Ikeda’s ‘Supersymmetry’ at the Brewer Street Carpark

Particles collide, buzz and shimmer in a top-floor carpark in London’s Soho. To enter the vast space is to be transported out of any ordinary sense of place, stumbling instead on a galaxy of mutating electronic signals, sounds and visual data. This is artist-composer Ryoji Ikeda’s latest work, drawing on his residency at the Centre For Nuclear Research (CERN). The world’s largest particle physics research institute, CERN is currently testing ‘supersymmetry’, a theoretical mathematical model that helps explain why particles have mass.

In Ikeda’s iteration, sudden musical shudders and strikes take on new logic, while infinite streams of coded text across forty projectors and computers form an intersection between visual art and mathematics. Set within a pitch-black environment, the flashed bright white and red illuminations ascend to a bold drama of minimal signs and splinters.

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Interview with Rachel de Joode

Soft flesh tones, cool, clean greys, creamy earthen textures and an expanse of white come together within the Kansas gallery. Filled with the pliant, textured surfaces of stone, skin, clay and algae, the viewer is enveloped in the comforting familiarity of the organic world. There is a curious flatness to be found however, upon closer inspection. Playing with perspective, cushiony curves are revealed to be lined by sharp, straight edges. 3D becomes 2D, and nothing is as it first appears.

Instead, Rachel de Joode’s new exhibition presents an inquiry almost into what else these familiar objects could be. Her materials, once soft and submissive, become rigid and uncompromising in their new artificial forms. Photographs at once trap and liberate the forms that they represent. Two-dimensional images of skin are abstracted to create sculptural compositions, presenting smooth, almost deflated ­– surfaces. Here, the real and its abstracted sculptural and photographic representations are placed on equal footing. Flickering between the fleshy reality of the body and its flattened onscreen representation, the two begin to blur under de Joode’s direction.

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Interview with Shezad Dawood about his film ‘Three Arrangements for Annabel and Cello’

A black corridor tunnels away from the white cube of the main room at Pippy Houldsworth, offering a cocooned inversion of the space. ‘The Box’ presents a series of unique commissions, running concurrently to major shows at the gallery. It is an intimate space, fitting only one person at a time, creating an intensely insular environment. Shezad Dawood’s film series ‘Three Arrangements for Annabel and Cello’ is the latest piece to be exhibited in The Box, played on a small screen placed at the end of the corridor, while Vicky Steiri’s score trickles through a single pair of headphones.

Set across a film of three parts, light and dark are entwined in a game of shadow play, shifting across the naked body of performer Annabel Hornsby. Primarily cast in silhouette in the first two parts of the film, glimpses of the fleshy tones of her skin are striking against the monochrome of her shadow. Limbs cut across sharp dots of light, exposed even as they are abstracted. Standing in the private space of The Box, Dawood’s film adopts a curious affinity to a surreal peepshow, the stark simplicity of the shadow heightening an awareness of the body itself.

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Interview with Natalie Dray

Electrical appliances click on and off. Pinks and reds abound, casting a softer glow across the stark open architecture of the gallery. The invisible mechanisms of technology are opened up as Natalie Dray forces them to the forefront, cladding sockets in newly adapted, colourful cases and draping wires across walls. She draws a fine line between the rhythms of the body and those of her machines, layering the two to reveal an enmeshed system of artificial and emotional intelligence in her solo exhibition ‘DRAY’ at London’s Cell Project Space. 

Published on POSTmatter. Read the rest here. 

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Piece on how we choose to spend our free time

"What do you do?" The inevitable question, preferably preceded by a self-deprecating nod to its predictability, and too often issued with the sideways glance of a challenge. It's loaded, rolling out to encompass status, interests, time spent and time wasted. The question's arrival in a conversation signals that it is time for you to smoothly summarise yourself in a few lines, packaging your career as prettily as you can. "What do you do?" It is baggy in its non-specific nature, and yet pointedly direct. Insistent and yet innocuous. Considered in its most literal sense, though, the ways in which we choose to spend our time demonstrate a great deal about us. How we draw the line not only between work and play, but how we split up our free time itself. Partying or reading, late-night drugs and the lost day that follows, or an early night and a gallery visit the next morning. Dinner parties or image research, Instagram scrolling or a film, sex or sleep. What do you do?

Published in i-D. Read the rest here.