Adrian Williams
11 May - 23 Jun 2012
ADRIAN WILLIAMS
11 May - 23 June 2012
A car ride into the night. A conversation begins. One directly takes part in the intimate situation of a conversation between two people whose relationship to each other remains open. Adrian Williams’ 16mm film only presents their voices. One invariably asks whether it is a fictional dialogue or a secretly recorded, authentic conversation. The shaky hand-held shots of the Argentine landscape at dusk and the sound quality suggest a documentary perspective, but the content of what is said initially does not. A man relates how he has repeatedly seen UFOs in the sky and says that his father had also already witnessed this phenomenon. The man’s detailed descriptions grip the listeners in such a way that the boundaries between fact and fiction ultimately become irrelevant, because the story becomes “true” the moment it is told. These constant changes in the narrator’s point of view are characteristic of Adrian Williams’ stories, so that beginning or end of the plot remains open. She invents fictional characters, partially embedding them in real situations or vice versa. She also tells her stories in the form of performances, sound pieces and works on paper. Her new group of paper works transforms the main room of the gallery into a spatially orchestrated “storybook”. What seem to be documentary photographs are combined in an associative manner with handwritten prose texts by Adrian Williams. Instead of constructing an unambiguous content, this form of combined text and image opens up multilayered variants of continuing or interpreting the respective narration. At the same time, these short stories place the focus on narrative spaces for what at first seem to be inconspicuous details of everyday life and sharpen one’s view for the grand narratives of relationships between people and to the world surrounding them that unfold in these spaces. In Adrian Williams’ performative pieces, the development of a story from purely oral communication to the presentation in and of space, as well as its transfer to bodily gestures and sounds, play a crucial role. One example is her six-part performance narrative titled “Episode”, which was told in the second person mode last year at Portikus Frankfurt a. M. in a theatre-like setting consisting of musical objects, instruments and interior requisites, and integrated the audience as additional protagonists. In Karlsruhe, the 14-member choir of „Vokalensemble der Katholischen Hochschulgemeinde Karlsruhe“ and its choir director Ralph Hammer will perform a 4-minute composition by Adrian Williams and Theodor Köhler for the duration of a sunset. This performance is part of a “collection of exercises”. The basic structures of the performance are fixed, but there are variable spaces for the choir and its conductor to subjectively improvise, depending on what the sunset really looks like at the specific location and point in time.
The performance venue will be announced by the gallery.
Adrian Williams (1979* USA) will be on view this June in the show “Fotografie total” at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at the Nassauische Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Art Production Fund LAB, New York, and the Art Statements in Basel. Her works have been shown in international group shows, among others, at Portikus Frankfurt a. M., Artspace San Antonio Texas, Kunstwerke Berlin, MACBA Barcelona, and Terminal Convention, Cork.
11 May - 23 June 2012
A car ride into the night. A conversation begins. One directly takes part in the intimate situation of a conversation between two people whose relationship to each other remains open. Adrian Williams’ 16mm film only presents their voices. One invariably asks whether it is a fictional dialogue or a secretly recorded, authentic conversation. The shaky hand-held shots of the Argentine landscape at dusk and the sound quality suggest a documentary perspective, but the content of what is said initially does not. A man relates how he has repeatedly seen UFOs in the sky and says that his father had also already witnessed this phenomenon. The man’s detailed descriptions grip the listeners in such a way that the boundaries between fact and fiction ultimately become irrelevant, because the story becomes “true” the moment it is told. These constant changes in the narrator’s point of view are characteristic of Adrian Williams’ stories, so that beginning or end of the plot remains open. She invents fictional characters, partially embedding them in real situations or vice versa. She also tells her stories in the form of performances, sound pieces and works on paper. Her new group of paper works transforms the main room of the gallery into a spatially orchestrated “storybook”. What seem to be documentary photographs are combined in an associative manner with handwritten prose texts by Adrian Williams. Instead of constructing an unambiguous content, this form of combined text and image opens up multilayered variants of continuing or interpreting the respective narration. At the same time, these short stories place the focus on narrative spaces for what at first seem to be inconspicuous details of everyday life and sharpen one’s view for the grand narratives of relationships between people and to the world surrounding them that unfold in these spaces. In Adrian Williams’ performative pieces, the development of a story from purely oral communication to the presentation in and of space, as well as its transfer to bodily gestures and sounds, play a crucial role. One example is her six-part performance narrative titled “Episode”, which was told in the second person mode last year at Portikus Frankfurt a. M. in a theatre-like setting consisting of musical objects, instruments and interior requisites, and integrated the audience as additional protagonists. In Karlsruhe, the 14-member choir of „Vokalensemble der Katholischen Hochschulgemeinde Karlsruhe“ and its choir director Ralph Hammer will perform a 4-minute composition by Adrian Williams and Theodor Köhler for the duration of a sunset. This performance is part of a “collection of exercises”. The basic structures of the performance are fixed, but there are variable spaces for the choir and its conductor to subjectively improvise, depending on what the sunset really looks like at the specific location and point in time.
The performance venue will be announced by the gallery.
Adrian Williams (1979* USA) will be on view this June in the show “Fotografie total” at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at the Nassauische Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Art Production Fund LAB, New York, and the Art Statements in Basel. Her works have been shown in international group shows, among others, at Portikus Frankfurt a. M., Artspace San Antonio Texas, Kunstwerke Berlin, MACBA Barcelona, and Terminal Convention, Cork.