Over the past year there have been several single channel works occupying the Audain Gallery at SFU's Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. Memorably there was Berlin-based Hito Steyerl's Adorno's Grey projected within a custom-designed screening room composed of elevated seating and a screen of fractured grey panels. Following that was another solo single channel exhibition by Vancouver's own Althea Thauberger, remounting her Marat Sade Bohnice, a video that centres on the staging of Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague. Now, London-based Ursula Mayer is on view with Not a curse, nor a bargain, but a hymn, an exhibition that is dominated by the screenings of her two films: Gonda and Medea.
Ursula Mayer
Played back to back, the films’ audio tracks are composed of dense dialogue that permeates the exhibition space, which also includes sculptural elements and photographs that echo the film's cues and characters. With scripts written by Maria Fusco and Patricia MacCormack, respectively, Gonda and Medea self-reflexively act out the process of spectatorship largely through the re-caressing of language and theory. While making the conventions of film language overt through this aural didacticism, the films in fact seduce the viewer with lush and sensuous cinematic moments, creating a jarring and asynchronous experience that in the end is not all together coherent. Reminiscent of experimental feminist cinema in tone, but with the high-end visuals of a misanthropic fashion system, the films’ glam industrial chic bodies appear to have the running interior monologue of a precocious Goth punk.
Notable on screen, but absent from the surrounding discourse, is Mayer's casting in both films of transgender, androgynous, and soft butch personas, including model Valentijn de Hingh and musician JD Samson. Even as they assume the role of lead protagonists, their presence is only surface, largely standing in as emblems of fluidity while revealing nothing of a fully realized queer or transgender subjectivity. Perhaps this is indicative of Mayer's use of systems, including sex and gender, as reference points to discombobulate, but in the endless sea of evocations from Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the works would have benefited if the characters represented were fully formed subjects, and not just theories and objects, of cinematic desire.
Audain Gallery: http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/audain-gallery/current.html
Ursula Mayer: Not a curse, nor a bargain, but a hymn continues until August 2.
Amy Fung is a writer and organizer who publishes nationally and internationally in journals, magazines, catalogues, and monographs in print and online. Her ongoings can be found at POSTpacificPOST.com and on Twitter @anotheramyfung. She is Akimblog's Vancouver correspondent.
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Ursula Mayer at the Audain Gallery
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