- Venue
- Arts Complex
- Location
- Scotland
Mining the fertile juncture between dance and visual art, this group exhibition brings together a collection of artists to address the physical agency and gesticulation of the body whilst investigating human surfaces alongside architectural and ambient spaces.
The preview of the exhibition hosted Transmission, a participatory dance installation by Skye Reynolds in collaboration with Jung in Jung. Beginning with an interactive glimpse of contact improvisation, the audience was invited to tug, stroke and engage the mute bodies of five performers. Their choreographic eruptions chimed with a familiar contemporary vocabulary in which the dancers moved along their own lines of energy and exchanged weight with graceful, sweeping motions. The tableau closed with an affecting solo which made audible the sounds of human limbs moving through the air in fluid and sinuous embellishments. Pulsating, spider-like hand gestures crafted creeping sonic whisperings while the miming of filigree, plant-like movements composed a landscape of sensitive sounds.
Riccardo Attanasio’s video work Diagrammer 1 comprises restrained yet visceral choreography in which a single male dancer poses his form in harmony with the metamorphosis of a geometric pattern in black tape. Opening with a shot of the dancer’s arching torso, the film skilfully utilises the scaffolds of the camera as a framing device which encircles the performer in his own furtive plot. Elsewhere in Andrew Houston’s film Untitled, set in a perturbed underground chamber, dancers writhe and animate their limbs in slumped, drooping movements as they drift languidly in and out of the frame, performing uneasy disappearing acts. Evoking the twisted figuration of Egon Schiele, Houston harnesses awkward gesticulation and gnarled contortions of the human frame.
Some of the most accomplished works in this exhibition belong to Adeline Bourret – the artist and curator at the centre of this collaborative project. Ghosts of Francesca Woodman are at play in her photographs in which she stages the architecture of her body against the artificial geography of the visual plane. The legibility of her photographic self-portraits is contaminated through a tantalising performance in which she appears to simultaneously invite and recoil from our gaze.
While it is true that the conceptual arc and assembled formal conclusions that constitute this exhibition could be cultivated further, this still proves to be a fluent and captivating demonstration of a perennially entrancing subject.