Opening tonight 18–20
Uriel Orlow & Céline Condorelli
Terrain Vague | Persistent Images
Uriel Orlow & Céline Condorelli, Terrain Vague | Persistent Images, 2012
Oslo Kunstforening is proud to announce the first presentation of the artists Uriel Orlow and Céline Condorelli in Norway.
In Terrain Vague | Persistent Images | حركات غير مكتملة works by Uriel Orlow and Céline Condorelli are in dialogue with each other in a multi-part installation. The exhibition explores blind spots, unexpected epilogues and disappearances in the history of twentieth century Egypt. A series of installations engage with the constitutive movements and stoppages affecting time and space: forced or arrested movements of people, the stopped flow of capital, political movements, removal of statues (and regimes) and migrating species.
Uriel Orlow’s The Short and the Long of It, retraces the forgotten story of fourteen international cargo ships stranded in the Suez canal for eight years as a result of the so-called six day war in 1967; a series of connected drawings focuses on the migration of maritime species through the canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Céline Condorelli’s First movement deals with relationship between the Egyptian cotton industry and the people who were its primary owners, who left Egypt following Nasser’s revolution, when the industry was nationalized. A joint installation Unfinished Movements revisits the empty lot of the former cotton exchange in Alexandria, where Nasser once stood to announce the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. The works are considering the latency of meaning of these moments and places and their connections with different versions of liberation.
Uriel Orlow: “History is up for grabs – it doesn’t have to be related to as a truth that is neatly re-inserted into a historical chronology. Instead, the imaginary, evocative potential of a minor event, forgotten in the twilight of history, connects to a whole host of associative chains and appears extra-ordinary, almost mythical. The work itself is articulated through fragments, shards of research, reconstructions and hallucinations: images and text beyond the dichotomy of fact and fiction.”
Céline Condorelli: “We know that story-telling, misreading or errors can produce real historical events. And in some way, as an artist, I am implicated in forging documents, devising utopias, and constructing imaginary schemes about the future, and in this way I actively participate in the production of the real. The project is not so much a fictionalized version of real events, than a narrative, a construct, enabling a different understanding of history and the re-imagination of possible futures.”
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist book, Terrains Vagues | حركات غير مكتملة | Persistent Images designed by Sophie Demay and Lola Halifa-Legrand; it includes interviews with Bassam El Baroni, Marianne Hultman, Jean-Marie Straub, and a text by Gilane Tawadros. The publication is developed in collaboration with Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), where a different version of the exhibition was exhibited in December 2011 –January 2012.
Terrain Vague | Persistent Images | حركات غير مكتملة is supported by the Fritt Ord Foundation and Pro Helvetia.
Uriel Orlow & Céline Condorelli, Terrain Vague | Persistent Images, 2012
Bio
Uriel Orlow’s practice explores blind spots of representation and investigates the spatial and pictorial conditions of history and memory. He works across media in video, photography, sound and drawing and creates modular, multi-media installations that bring archival research and different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. He has been teaching since 1997 and is currently senior research fellow at the University of Westminster London. He was the recipient of a prestigious Swiss Art Award at Art Basel in both 2008 and 2009.
Recently, Orlow’s work was part of the off-site Swiss Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, the 8th Mercosul Biennale Brazil and at exhibitions at Contemporary Image Collective Cairo, Bétonsalon and Fondation Ricard, Paris and Prefix Institute of Contemorary Art, Toronto. His work has also been shown at Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery London, Les Complices* Zürich, Guangzhou Triennial China and the South African National Gallery Cape Town amongst others.
Uriel Orlow & Céline Condorelli, Terrain Vague | Persistent Images, 2012
Bio
Celine Condorelli works with art and architecture, combining a number of approaches from developing structures for ‘supporting’ (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites, resulting in projects merging exhibitions, politics, fiction, display, public space, sound, writing, and whatever else feels urgent at the time. She is the author/editor of Support Structures on Sternberg Press, 2009, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, UK; she has been teaching and lecturing since 1999, and is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan.
Recent work includes Social Fabric, Iniva, London (2012), Surrounded by the Uninhabitable, SALT Istanbul, “There is nothing left”, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Townhouse, Egypt (2011-12), Something Stronger than Skepticism, Alias, Krakow Photomonth (2011), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), Revision, part 1 and 2 (Artists Space, New York, 2009, and Cell Projects, London, 2010), Curtain Show (Eastside Projects, 2010), and Life always Escapes (Wysing Arts, Cambridge, and e-flux journal 2009).