News

£10 Non-Members

Join us for an artist talk by duo Pil & Galia Kollectiv who are currently showing in PROJECT 02: Verging on the Absurd, the second in our new series of displays showcasing work by our Artist Members and guest artists.

Pil & Galia Kollectiv are concerned with the legacy of modernism, labour, leisure and collaboration, amongst other things. Their talk will draw on research for a recently completed PhD to discuss the relationship between art and politics in Dada and Surrealism. They will discuss artistic methodology and the use of the absurd as a political tool by these 20th century avant-garde groups and will look at art historical precedents for their work. The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Verging on the Absurd examines the use of the absurd and surreal in contemporary art with works by artists Suzanne Mooney, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Francesco Pedraglio, Heather Phillipson and Samara Scott. Exhibition runs until 28 June 2013. Open Tuesday – Friday, 11.00-17.00.

Image: Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Conflict within the Organization, 2010, screensaver, installation view at the Contemporary Art Society 2013, duration 6.48 minutes, © the artists. Photo: Joe Plommer

(Im)material Labour

(Im)material Labour explores our shifting position in an economically functioning society. From the systemisation of post-fordist labour through to the de-materialisation of the service sector, our patterns of working behaviour are constantly being reconfigured.

(Im)material Labour draws together the work of a number of artists who interrogate this phenomenon in light of the current economic climate. Seeking to decode and humanise the financial crisis through analytical ideas and research, the works on display often result in therapeutic and humorous outcomes.

The exhibition will take place both onsite and offsite in a disused office block in Colchester.

The exhibition includes works by SUPERFLEX, Zachary Formwalt, Ignacio Uriarte, Paul Westcombe and Arnaud Desjardin.

The exhibition includes works by Martin John Callanan, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Arnaud Desjardin, Patrick Coyle, Nick Bailey, Paul Westcombe, Hyun Woo Lee and a new commission by Galeria Niewielka.

Find us at Victoria Place (off Elm Lane), Colchester, CO1 1LR – above the Slack Space exhibition spaces.

(Im)material Labour is curated by MA Critical Curating students Warren Harper, Matylda Taszycka and alumnus Jonathan Weston.

Join the exhibition’s curators for a tour of (Im)material Labour at Art Exchange

Join the exhibition’s curators for a tour of (Im)material Labour offsite at Elm Lane.

25.5.13 The next exhibition at xero, kline & coma, Mark Pawson - Unboxing, opens 5.6.13:

After being invited to loan material to two exhibitions in 2011 (the Stewart Home retrospective at White Columns, New York and the fanzine exhibition which was part of the Dazed Live Festival, London), and also writing an article in response to the question 'Why Distribute? Why Archive?' for the 2012 Bookworks publication 'Again, A Time Machine, from distribution to archive’, it felt as if the numerous cardboard boxes stashed under my bed, in the hall cupboard and kitchen cabinets had somehow changed status and been transformed from 'Stuff' into an 'Archive'. I thought that it was the right time to start sorting through some of these boxes, to see what was in there and to see what would happen as a result of this process. So after writing a note to myself saying 'Start cataloguing some of this stuff.', on the morning of February 5th 2013, I opened up an A4 paper box crammed full of mid to late 1990s fanzines and publications by artists, sat down in front of the computer and started cataloguing them…

Mark Pawson will be unpacking, cataloguing and displaying some of his extensive library of zines, mail art publications, small press magazines, leaflets, pamphlets and other hard-to-categorise print creations – a collection which accumulated over the past 30 years and has managed to survive intact after several changes of address. He will be working in the gallery each Sunday during the exhibition, adding material to the display and producing weekly catalogue sheets, which will be available at the gallery and online at www.xero-kilne-coma.com. Pawson is an artist, publisher, bookseller and lecturer. Since being at school he's made and distributed a constant stream of books, postcards, badges, multiples, T-shirts and other essential ephemera, some examples of which are in the collections of the Tate Gallery Library, London and MOMA Library, New York. He was an active and prolific participant in the international postal art network during the 1980s and early 1990s and has reviewed independent publications for Variant Magazine since 1998.

9.5.13 Tomorrow we will be in conversation with Jamie Stevens (curator, Cubitt) at the ICA at 13:00:

Please join us now for a lunchtime talk with Pil and Galia Kollectiv, who will be joined in conversation by Jamie Stevens, curator at Cubitt Gallery.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and the avant-garde. Testing the boundaries between art and propaganda, they explore overlaps between the discourses of business management and political and artistic manifestos. They are especially interested in the role of art and creativity in post-Fordist labour and their films and performances often use choreographed movement and ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, juxtaposing consumer rites and religious ceremonies.

They have had solo shows at Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand, S1 Artspace, Sheffield and The Showroom Gallery, London. They have also presented live work at Biennials in Montreal, Berlin and Herzliya, as well as at Kunsthall Oslo, Arnolfini, Bristol, Late at Tate Britain, Radar Loughborough, HKD Rijeka and ICA London.

They are contributing editors at Art Papers and directors of artist run project space xero, kline & coma. They work as lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Reading.

Jamie Stevens is curator at Cubitt Gallery, where his programme has included exhibitions by Jana Euler, Michael Dean and Roman Vasseur. He co-founded publishing project Benedictions and was formerly Exhibitions Organiser at Chisenhale Gallery.

22.4.13 Andrew Cooper, Enda Deburka, Dean Kenning, John Russell - Capital opens at xero, kline & coma on 1.5.13 at 19:00:

"Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him".

The global banking collapse of 2008 exposed the failures of a deregulated economic system run entirely for private financial gain. Despite the market crash, investors kept the fortunes conjured out of speculative bubbles and bankers kept their remuneration packages and bonuses, whilst governments agreed to pay the bill with huge transfusions of public money. Since then, the rich have grown richer, sucking up ever-larger proportions of wealth, gorging on luxury, whilst working people have been subjected to joblessness, the removal of social provision and benefits, and attacks on wages and working conditions. In the UK the ruling class dullards have used the bank bailouts and the recession not to curb market excesses, but as an opportunity to shrink the welfare state and the public sector, privatising control over areas of our collective lives from housing to health to education. Wealth spurts up towards a bloated mediocrity, while the majority are increasingly proletarianised in order to make the country ‘competitive'; and the media, when they are not celebrating the ruthless spirit of enterprising halfwits, comment on how Dickensian it is all looking, what with all the homelessness and dispossession. As food banks multiply and quaint relics of Victorian charity attempt to mop up the aftermath of frenzied assaults against the poor and sick and most vulnerable, many people, in their effort to understand our collective submission to capital's relentless intensification, have been led back to the most far reaching analysis and critique of our system of political economy, Marx' Capital.

Marx takes us beyond both the moral and technocratic complaints that capitalism is an unfair and unstable system in need of reform and regulation, to show that in its very lifeblood, capitalism is a practice of accumulation based on robbery and exploitation backed by compulsion and force. It is a class relation which cannot ultimately be ameliorated but which must be overthrown through collective struggle. The work in this exhibition is an attempt to visualise the moments of this vast, homogenising abstraction that dominates our lives today, as described by Marx in Capital Volume One.

The show has grown out of a regular Marx reading group meeting at the Royal Festival Hall, one of the last vestiges of post-war free public space in London.

Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 10.30am – 5.30 pm & Saturday: 10.30am – 4pm

Address: 84-94 Great Patrick Street, Belfast, BT1 2LU, Northern Ireland

Strange Loop explores the complex relationship between past, present and future, examining how the context in which we live determines our interpretation of history and our perception of the future. The works in the exhibition challenge and explore the ways in which we remember, re-imagine, reinterpret, re-enact, revisit and repress past events, demonstrating that history can be approached just as fluidly as our imagined futures. We are urged to question how human memory affects our perception of personal and global histories and the impact that this has on future events.

Within this, Strange Loop also considers artists, works and subject matter which are somehow out of place within their own contexts. Whether expatriates, beings from another planet or concepts within alternate realities, the lines between fact and fiction, past, present and future all become distorted, blurred or challenged. Anachronisms, inaccuracies and disproved theories abound in the coming together of multiple temporalities which create uncertainty as to where beginning, middle and end exist, if at all.

The exhibition features works by: Amanda Beech; Cliff Chiang; EASTERJESUS PRODUCTIONS (Stine Omar and Max Boss); Simon Fujiwara; Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff; Pil and Galia Kollectiv; Beth Lau; and Ryan Moffett.

"It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life."
Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography,1975

Cinema is affected by successive waves of technological advancement, with each development announcing the auditorium's imminent obsolescence. Flatness will survey aesthetic developments in experimental film and video post Web 2.0 looking at moving image works that relate to the screen as a metaphorical boundary in representation — as a surface, as well as an interface.

While film and video both conformed to a medium, the different interfaces through which we have come to understand the Internet act to redefine our relationship with material reality, to history and with each other. Is it possible to gauge how our consciousness has been affected by the mediation of the screen as a mirror and as a window on to our lives? Does our online routine of sharing information endlessly, passively en gaging by "liking" things, bring about a flatness of expression, in frustration at the failed promise of a World Wide Web utopia? And is it possible to suggest a correlation whereby, as the space behind the screen flattens, the space in front — between the viewer and the image — transforms for the viewer to project their response back in real time, effectively blurring the boundary of the screen?

From the quickly distributed compressed image to the enhanced reality of HD how do artists working with moving image approach these new aesthetic qualities? The idea of an immersive visual language — where we respond to images with images — might point to the future of production facilitated by the Internet’s vast audio-visual library. Does cinema therefore become a space for a parallel, or second screen for "old" media and strange collective experiences at odds to the self-directed, individualized space in front of our laptops? Featuring works by Harun Farocki, Stanya Kahn, Mattin, Rachel Reupke, Richard Serra, Ed Atkins, Oliver Laric, Hito Steyerl and others, Flatness proposes that the auditorium acts as a temporary vehicle, allowing moving image works and performance to pause in their circulation through the different contexts of contemporary visual culture.

The curator:
Shama Khanna is a curator, writer and visiting University lecturer based in London. Over the course of her career she has worked with Showroom, Tate, BFI London Film Festival and LUX / ICA Biennial of Moving Image in London; Iaspis in Umeå, Kunstverein Muenchen and with e-flux, Performa and MoMA PS1 in New York City.

17.3.13 We will be performing and screening Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World on 19.4.13 at 23:45 at the Rio Cinema in Dalston:

A film and live performance event by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, featuring Jack Barraclough, Katia Barrett, Emily Rachel Beber, Victor M. Jakeman, Joseph Lewis, Rosie Ridgway and Stefan Sadler

Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World is a film and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. A theatrical staging of a morality play for end times and future folk music, it recasts eschatology, or the study of the end of history, as a foundational myth for a future society. Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity. The film, shot on black and white VHS at Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in Cumbria, dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog, using a mix of conventional, obscure and makeshift instruments. In the tradition of books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Terminal imagines artistic expression and new folk traditions for a world to come after the apocalypse. If, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of the end of capitalism, the project juxtaposes these two endpoints to test out how alternative scenarios might emerge from the collaborative practice of making theatre and music against a setting of social collapse.

Terminal is a collaboration with a group of London based artists and musicians. Katia Barrett is an artist and a member of the bands Peepholes and Cover Girl. Victor M. Jakeman and Emily Rachel Beber are both members of WE, with Pil and Galia Kollectiv. Victor also plays with Whitby Bay, Gold Bars and Human Hair, and Emily is a writer. Joseph Lewis and Stefan Sadler make music together as Swine-thing, as well as pursuing individual art, writing and curatorial practices. Rosie Ridgway is an artist and curator at Sauna, as well as a member of the band Ravioli Me Away. Jack Barraclough is an artist and a member of the band Halo Halo.

This event marks the London premiere of Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World.

We are also participating in the exhibition Verging on the Absurd at the Contemporary Art Society:

Exhibition Dates: 5 April – 28 June 2013 Opening Times: Tuesday – Friday, 11.00 – 17.00

The Contemporary Art Society is delighted to introduce the second in our new series of displays showcasing our Artist Members and guest artists, Verging on the Absurd, which is curated by Elinor Morgan, freelance curator and ESP Programmer at Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Examining the use of the absurd and surreal in contemporary art, the exhibition presents works by artists Suzanne Mooney, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Francesco Pedraglio, Heather Phillipson and Samara Scott. These artists make works that disrupt our understanding and perception of an object, image or text to give rise to new readings and associations, interfering with our desire to make sense of something and find completeness. Each does this in a different way: by unsettling the viewer through the uncanny use of one material in the place of another, fracturing an image from its original context or making new combinations or juxtapositions of material and concept.

16.2.13 Kitty Clark | Stefan Sadler - Horror House opens at xero, kline & coma on 28.2.13:

Horror House is a two-person exhibition by Kitty Clark and Stefan Sadler, featuring sculptural work that explores dark, surreal craft and absurd ritual. Evoking the morbid farce of a ghost train, the smell of rubber and the fishing wire visible, it delivers goosebumps nonetheless.

Kitty Clark’s work tends towards cartoon-like three dimensional objects rooted in fantasy, idealism and spiritual and utopian desire, exploring contemporary mythologies through sacred and recreational sites and artificial themed environments. She has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Jamais Vu and Permanent Gallery, and participated in group exhibitions including Likeable, Supercollider Contemporary Art Projects and Glamourie, PSL.

Stefan Sadler is a hardcore action cartoonist, at work on global topics, war, death, In a world both familiar and out of reach, fraught with political and social complexities. His recent publications include Dinner Plates (Famicon Express) and DNA Failure (Picturebox Inc.).

PEANUT UNDERGROUND ART PROJECTS presents TIME IS LOVE.6 [show 3] International video art program Curated by Kisito Assangni

PEANUT UNDERGROUND 215 East 5th Street Lowel level, East Village NEW YORK CITY 10003

With Aditi Kulkarni, Anthony Peskine, Bill Millett, Ciriaca Erre, Cristina Picchi, Danny Germansen, Dellani Lima, Denis Brun, ELASTIC Group, Eugene Perera, Evelin Stermitz, Francesca Fini, Gilivanka Kedzior & Barbara Friedman, Isidora Ficovic, Jangyoung Jung, Jennida Chase, Jennifer Abessira, Joas Nebe, Jonas Nilsson, Joy Whalen, Kent Anderson Butler, Kokou Ekouagou, Larissa Sansour, Larry Caveney, Laszlo Laszlo Revesz, Neil Howe, Nina Backman, Otelo Fabiao, Paul Rascheja, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Polina Zioga, Rita Casdia, Sabrina Osborne, Sohrab Kashani, Tommaso Pedone, Tommy Becker, Tor Jorgen Van Eijk, Uma Ray, Yotam

Gilad. TIME IS LOVE Screening is an annual international video art program on the theme of love in hard times. Since 2008 the project has presented the most innovative works that bring to the world a refreshing perspective on video art. (Image credit: Absorb, Aditi Kulkarni).

TIME IS LOVE.6 [show 4]
International video art program
Curated by Kisito Assangni

Featuring
Aditi Kulkarni, Anthony Peskine, Bill Millett, Ciriaca Erre, Cristina Picchi & Yuval Gerstein, Danny Germansen, Dellani Lima, Denis Brun, ELASTIC Group, Eugene Perera, Evelin Stermitz, Francesca Fini, Gilivanka Kedzior & Barbara Friedman, Isidora Ficovic, Jangyoung Yung, Jennida Chase, Jennifer Abessira, Joas Nebe, Jonas Nilsson, Joy Whalen, Kent Anderson Butler, Kokou Ekouagou, Larissa Sansour, Larry Caveney, Laszlo Laszlo Revesz, Neil Howe, Nina Backman, Otelo Fabiao, Paul Rascheja, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Polina Zioga, Rita Casdia, Sabrina Osborne, Sohrab Kashani, Tommaso Pedone, Tommy Becker, Tor Jorgen Van Eijk, Uma Ray, Yotam Gilad.

12.1.13 Eitan Ben-Moshe - Twilight Falcons opens at xero, kline & coma on 17.1.13:

Eitan Ben-Moshe's 'Ozone Flutes', borderline human-made and organic looking tubes drilled in swift, nonviolent urban guerilla interventions into walls around London anoint the ordinary with the extra. In his new installation (part of an ongoing series), Ben-Moshe accentuates the welcome typo in London's harsh topology that is xero, kline & coma, a happy accident tearing into its space-time continuum. This basic-yet-crucial scenery establishes a ritual transition, like the red curtains of the cinema theatre or the wooden doors of a fairground's house of horrors. A little pond littered with derelict alien looking fauna. A rickety old stool offers unstable rest – or perhaps it is an accessory left behind following the conclusion of some personal, idiosyncratic rite. An environment in flickering superposition, complementing the penetration of the real with its suggestion of parallel probability, entangled with the one we're trapped in, a waiting room, a threshold, a wardrobe, a wormhole. Limbo.

Accompanying the installation, the film 'The Ozone Flutes' documents the nomadic, transient, psychogeographical Ozone Flute workings. Appropriating public access TV aesthetics, it not only follows the actions but introduces a cast of characters who guided Ben-Moshe, centring on an English shaman woman from Finchley who provides the artist with an occult, energetic grid of the city. In the process, the artist becomes a messenger, placing the objects, now charged with a shaman's forcing of the hand of chance, at points of morphogenetic importance. Did the flutes contribute to an unlocking of a collective, feral will to power expressed through the ensuing London riots? Can that will be harnessed more directly and constructively?

Eitan Ben-Moshe planted and presented his Ozone Flutes throughout 2011, culminating in the Anthony Gross curated Deptford X Public Art project. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Basel, Berlin, Istanbul and the Venice Biennial. He lectures in Fine Art at The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.

Avi Pitchon is an Israeli writer and curator living and working in London. In 2010 he curated the first Middle-Eastern retrospective of Slovenian visual arts group IRWIN. He has curated shows in London, Berlin, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, contributed to numerous publications including a book accompanying Yael Bartana's recent Venice Biennial appearance, an artist book on Keren Cytter published by KW Berlin, and Manifesta 7's companion book. He has also contributed to magazines and periodicals, including Terrorizer, The Wire, Vice and Haaretz.

Artist Talk – Pil & Galia Kollectiv

(Im)material Labour