Cally Spooner
DRAG DRAG SOLO
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is delighted to host the largest solo show by Cally Spooner to date, sitting somewhere between a retrospective and a rehearsal. At a moment where reality can feel degraded, the exhibition probes how subjectivity and its bodies change whilst the technological condition shapes them, as well as how and where language itself may undergo damage.
Spooner’s work is essentially always in the making, each exhibition or event a continuation and rehearsal of the last. Evolved over long periods of time, across a variety of venues, her work is carried by casts of performers, text and objects, which remain embedded in the living and mediated fabric of her practice.
Reflecting on the erosion of voice and language in neoliberal and technological milieus, Spooner’s absurdist scripts, fictions, films and events explore the choreography of invisible violence in the digital age. Her comedic and dystopian replays of the political, economic and media rhetoric of our time, carry a virulent critique of corporate performance and ‘chrono-normative history’ alike. Considering these as ‘corrosive’ to both life and utterance, she responds by presenting rehearsals and duration as a mode of resistance.
For DRAG DRAG SOLO, Spooner presents three distinct bodies of work on separate floors of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. One is complete and closed; one remains open; the last is in the future.
On the second floor is Spooner’s multi-person performance-to camera, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013 – 2015); a work which has more in common with a live choreographic event than cinema. In this five-channel installation, a musical is shot in a single take. A chorus line gossip about celebrities, athletes, and politicians who outsourced their performance to a technology, whilst a marketing practice is quoted in which employees’ words and voices are tweaked to TV-commercial perfection. This is the first presentation of the work since its premiere at the Stedelijk Museum in 2016.
On the third floor, works created between 2016– 18, comprising objects, sound and live events create an ecosystem of fact and fiction, hinting at a ‘novel in progress’. Events that relate to shock and grief are evoked across narratives, then juxtaposed with expanded definitions of outsourcing and a single false tear, sustaining one another in an un-synced constellation of aliveness and deadness. Spooner is calling the sum total of the third floor ‘a fiction’, knowing that fiction is always only a few degrees removed from reality, at a moment in time when language is undergoing damage, and facts are being neglected.
Finally, off-site and in the Cinema Dynamo at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève will be the earliest research stages of Spooner’s yet-to-emerge performance company, OFFSHORE. In advance of its launch this spring in London (as the outcome of Spooner’s Stanley Picker Fellowship, and the beginning of this long term project), Spooner will create a series of workshops in collaboration with HEAD – Genève, Geneva University of Art and Design and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon’s Post Performance Future students, titled AGAINST THE PERFORMATIVE.
DRAG DRAG SOLO as an entirety takes its title from a ten-minute silent film by Spooner, commissioned by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for their Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in 2016. The film absorbs, and is affected by sounds in its proximity, which have thus far included Bruce Nauman’s film Violent Incident, live radio, an alarm clock, as well as sound works by Spooner herself. Considering the chance to be thrown out of sync by sources outside of oneself, DRAG DRAG SOLO—both film and exhibition—equally contain an awkward subtext; the politics between collaboration and solo performance in our digital and carnal present.
This exhibition is made in partnership with the Swiss Institute, New York, where it will manifest in a new constellation in December 2018. Alongside, OFFSHORE IN NEW YORK will evolve, arriving as a radical school and office.
A specifically commissioned book published by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Mousse, containing scripts, scores and drawings from And You Were Wonderful, On Stage will be published during the exhibition.
Finally, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève will be partnering with Vleeshal, Middelburg and the Madre·museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, to create the most comprehensive monograph on Spooner’s work to date, due for release in late 2018.
Cally Spooner’s recent solo exhibitions include The New Museum, New York and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (in 2016), Vleeshal, Middleburg (2015). She is author of Collapsing In Parts (Mousse, 2013) and Scripts (Slimvolume, 2016).
Curated by Andrea Bellini
