Date: 10.05.2016 — 28.05.2016
Beginning: 19:00
Anne-Claire Barriga is the intermedia type of artist. You could say that for each additional idea she seeks for adequate form of making. In the recent past used her own literary creation in the process of film production and directing. The result was a feature film based on her script. Writing for her is pretty much the starting point even now, but the visual language is completely different. Rudimentary tools are her own lyrics tuned into folk songs, which Barriga presses into strips of magnetic tape. During the public presentation of her residential studio in Meet Factory she installed these tapes partly on its walls, and installation was then shaped by the movement of the invited girl. That fluid motion passed among visitors in the hallway in front of the artist´s studio and with spiraling ribbon swirling in the air. On another occasion of open studios she decided to collaborate with the artist Ladislav Vondrák in a joint performance. Vondrák with the help of wooden stilts ranged from improvised shelf with brightly colored alcohols, where Barriga was serving him little sips, then on stilts he walked to the strip of felt hanging from the ceiling and spat that sip at it. Fluid from felt was falling to the photograph of hand resting on the floor. Thus, the whole procedure was repeated several times, including changing the color of cocktails.
In the exhibition in the etc. gallery Anne-Claire Barriga develops this work further. To the magnetic tapes are added handmade gloves. It’s the classic design of working gloves, but among them there is one bizarre exception: the gloves of snakeskin (sloughs). As these objects and performances with Ladislav Vondrák bear one basic theme: all these gestures work with popularity, with folk culture. Anne-Claire Barriga does not particularly exalt the folkiness, neither she directly criticizes it. The source of inspiration is for her, apart from the music genre, a decorative craft traditions of indigenous Indian population in Chile (where Anne Claire Barriga partly comes from) as well as her personal experience working as a barmaid. Therefore she either deals with folkiness, she thematizes its basic components and analyzes her own empirical experience. Folk is a craft and souvenir labor and commodity, folk song has universally shared dimension. Although the objects are silent and do not move Anne-Claire Barriga counts with particularity of movement or transfer in them.
Oxymoron “Silent Songs” here is literally “silently materialized”. This creates a special situation the artists herself already calls a “productive sterility”. It´s offering even the thought that folkiness in this procedure is even gagged and her character is partially obscured and metaphorized in magnetic ribbon. It also introduces us to the essential nature of attraction, or rather catchy folk melodies and simply memorable lyrics. Poetry of text here exists in its analogous materia and generates another, namely spatial significance. Despite this fact, the artist achieves her initial intention so that the exhibition would not weigh no more than ten kilos.
Curator: Radim Langer
