msdm a nomadic house-studio-gallery for photographic art and curatorial research, an expanded practice of the artist's book, photobook publishing and peer-to-peer collaboration created by contemporary artist paula roush
Electric House Border Agency Office Kabbalah Laser toner (two passes, grayscale and duotone) on Fabriano paper 86 cm x 120 cm
This set of 8 prints layer photographs of the carved urns -dedicated to ‘fire’, ‘air’, ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘time’, ‘energy’, ‘flight’, ‘Elysium’, and ‘Hesperides’ -crowning the capitals of the internal courtyard columns, with photographic traces of immigration bureaucracy.
Electric House Border Agency Office Kabbalah documents the space currently known as Electric House, a grade II listed building in the heart of East Croydon that is today closed and waiting redevelopment into luxury apartments and store. The photographs survey the compression of two uses of the building that signal the heritage (official or not) of Croydon public services architecture. On the one hand, investigates the 1st era of the building, and the overlooked influence of alchemy and metaphysics, in the work of British architect Robert Atkinson, commissioned by the County Borough of Croydon to create the Electricity showrooms, between 1939 -1942. On the other hand, it exposes the second life of the building as the infamous UK Border Agency, which was modernised from the original showrooms into offices and interview rooms in the 1990s.
Office Kabbalah Photozine 32 pages | 20 cm x 14 cm | laser printed black & white on corona offset 120g | unbound A collaboration with carpark magazine #13
Electric House Electricity showrooms for County Borough of Croydon by Robert Atkinson 1939-42 Home Office and Ministry of Home Security public basement shelter 1941-1945 Remodeled for the home office UK Border Agency 1990-2013 Listed Grade II Heritage Building 1995 msdm studio 2018-2019
Offset Litho prints 29.7 cm x 21 cm and 29.7 cm x 42 cm Munken paper 120gsm, colour Still photographs of the film set Queer Paper Gardens (HD, 21m, colour, sound)
Bookwork Queer paper gardens or the Wildlife of symbols, Collage-Roman. Five softcover volumes in a customised, numbered and signed grey board slipcase, 21 cm x 29.7 cm, offset printed in munken pure paper 150 gr., edition of 100 Lisbon: EDP Foundation 2013
Flora McCallica, photographic installation Queer Paper Gardens exhibition, Museu da Electricidade Lisbon, 2013
video installation Queer Paper Gardens exhibition, Museu da Electricidade Lisbon, 2013
video installation Dreaming Through exhibition, 198 Gallery London, 2013
Collage salon Queer Paper Gardens exhibition, Museu da Electricidade Lisbon, 2013
collage mosaics installation Dreaming Through exhibition, 198 Gallery London, 2013 and Queer Paper Gardens exhibition, Museu da Electricidade Lisbon, 2013
collage collaged narratives historical archive artistic research Valentine Penrose collage-book Dons des Féminines Max Ernst roman-collage Une Semaine de Bonté Mary Delany botanical-collage Flora Delanica
Queer Paper Gardens: paula roush & maria lusitano curated by Joao Pinharanda June 6 – September 8 2013 Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon [Curator’s text: João Pinharanda Undermining the Surrounding World] [ Exhibition review: Luisa Soares de Oliveira Mulheres fatais e outras que tais/ Fatal women and others as such: A visit to the surrealist museum through collage Ipsilon Publico Magazine 23 August 2013 portuguese / english] [ Exhibition review: Celso Martins Colagem e Colisao / Collage and collision An artistic collaboration around the dances and counterdances of gender, retrieves collage as a mode of associating images Expresso Atual Magazine, 22 June 2013 portuguese / english ]
Queer Paper Gardens approaches the history of collage through
a combination of artistic research and historic visual enquiry. Including an
installation made up of a collage-salon, two double-screen video-essays and two
large-scale charcoal drawings, the project explores
travel and collage as interlinked cultural queer and feminist practices in its
relationship to contemporary art.
The project focuses on several works of collage, created
across three centuries, ranging from Flora Delanica (1772-1782), Mary Delany's
botanical collage work considered a pioneering instance of collage on paper, to
the photographic collages of the Victorian era and, finally, to the Modernist
collage-novels that constitute the exhibition's fulcrum: Max Ernst's Une
Semaine de Bonté (1934), and Valentine Penrose's Dons des Féminines (1951).
Revisiting all these works brings out a number of visual and
textual narratives that explore the concept of journey: a journey through the
history of collage and a delocalisation in time – something quite appropriate
to the inherent features of the collage technique; This journey makes visible
ways in which collage creates spaces that facilitate experiments with botanical
taxonomies as metaphors for gender and sexuality and also a critique of the
bourgeois domestic setting conveyed through escapist dreams and travel to
exotic locations.
The relation between collage and art publishing is part of artists’
books history. Two relevant examples of small editions books are part of the
exhibition’s material sources: Max Ernst’s A Week of Goodness (1934) and
Valentine Penrose’s Dons des Feminines (1951). Both propose new perspectives on
the relationship between found material and personal biography, collage and
narrative, image and text. Departing from these and looking at early
predecessors of the visual book- encountered in the Georgian hortus siccus
(herbarium) and the Victorian photo album- the project explores:
– Working with found material: the author as editor with a subjective vision of
an archive or collection
– A queer and feminist history of collage that looks at early precursors of
collage amongst 18th century landscape female artists, female victorian
photo-collage, the surrealist collage novel and contemporary collage approaches
– Visual storytelling when sequencing books: strategies that range from
cinematic structure to the travel book.
Collage photoworks xerox photographs with construction bricks and archival cotton tying tape printed on newsprint paper 38 cm x 29 cm
Newspaper work The past persists in the present in the form of a dream(Participatory Architectures, Memory, Revolution) 12 pages, colour, newsprint paper 29cm ×38 cm
(How to) Build Your Own Living Structures Collage photoworks synthetic linen inkjet prints stretched as hardcover book
Participatory Architectures (Memory, Archive, Revolution) Installation, various dimensions Unbound exhibition | Herbert Read Gallery, University for the Creative Arts Canterbury 2017
Participatory Architectures (Memory, Archive, Revolution) Installation, various dimensions Paradigm Store exhibition | Howick Place London | 2015
Installation Assemblage with trestles, night stand, newspaper work, 122x 40x 80 cm. Art in a bookshell: A survey of artists working with and inspired by books exhibition | Milton Gallery London | 2015
Monochrome prints and wearables on paper and fabric on metal structures shot (two tones) with a paintball gun (collaboration with GBH)
Paintball Field {Blue & Yellow] bookwork printed with a Monochrome Océ Laser on Xerox Bond paper shot with paintball gun (two tones) by GBH 118.9 x 84.1 cm each folio, installed on metal table with chipboard top
Monochrome xerox prints on paper and fabric shot (two tones) with a paintball gun (collaboration with GBH) with props, installed on metal, foam and and wood structures Installation views of the exhibition PAINTBALL FIELD (3,06 billion cycles per second) Commissioned by Barreiro Photography Month at AMAC Red Gallery Auditório Municipal Augusto Cabrita 1 Nov 2018 – 10 Feb 2019
Monochrome Laser prints on pleated paper Installation views of exhibition Grange Studios 2016
Newspaperwork 24 pages, b&w digital print, newsprint paper, 35 x 50 cm
Photozine available in 2 sizes 20 x 28.5 cm (A4 page size) / 14x 20 cm (A5 page size) laser printed black & white on canon ivory paper 80gsm 28 pages, hand-bound, 3-hole pamphlet stitch edition of 100, released 2018, msdm publications
Paintball Field was made during a residency in the ‘schist’ mountain villages of Portugal. The area has become depopulated and is now being developed as a destination for tourists. The title of the work refers to a local recreation area where visiting families come with their children to play war games using guns firing balls of paint. The photographs conjure up a hunting scene in which a female figure wearing a cork mask – resembling those that were used by the original villagers during carnival – is being pursued. More than a simple ironic take on violence and war, the work draws on ethnographic connotations, evoking a dramatic encounter between the rural traditions of the past and present-day cultural practices. (3.06 billion cycles per second is the clock speed of the computer used to create the photoworks, expressed in gigahertz: 3.06 GHz. The computer is only one of the mediating elements in this practice, connected to capturing, editing, printing and publishing devices. An underlying trauma is the feeling of loss: emotional, social and technological. Loss of loved ones, lived spaces and computing power)
bookwork, 2018 printed with a Monochrome Océ Laser on Xerox Bond paper shot with paintball gun (two tones) by GBH 118.9 x 84.1 cm each folio, installed on metal table with chipboard top
Paintball Field was made during a
residency in the ‘schist’ mountain villages of Portugal. The area has become
depopulated and is now being developed as a destination for tourists. The title
of the work refers to a local recreation area where visiting families come with
their children to play war games using guns firing balls of paint. The
photographs conjure up a hunting scene in which a female figure wearing a cork
mask – resembling those that were used by the original villagers during
carnival – is being pursued. More than a simple ironic take on violence and
war, the work draws on ethnographic connotations, evoking a dramatic encounter
between the rural traditions of the past and present-day cultural practices.
A STORY table edition 21 single section books 148 x 210 mm each, duotone toner prints on 80gsm paper installed on wood trestle table 60 x 74 x 200 cm
BUS-SPOTTING leporello edition leporello with 31 folds, closed: 29x21 cm; total length unfolded: 1,271 cm installed in in wood & metal support structure 28x x 49 x 180 cm
About the project
BUS-SPOTTING + A STORY marks the launch of Found Photo Foundation’s Orphan Series. Each work in the series explores a particular approach to publishing the printed material in the Found Photo Foundation collection. Orphan #1 BUS-SPOTTING + A STORY is the result of the collaboration with Mireille Ribière, author, photographer and scholar.
BUS-SPOTTING + A STORY is a 4-part photo-essay. Parts 1 and 2 (Bus Ride) comprise a sequence of 32 photographs in the form of twin books, split in images of double and single-decker buses. Part 3 (A Story) uses text and image with reference to the genre of photo-romance. Part 4 (Transport Enthusiasts) elucidates the raison d’être of the overall work, as well as the context in which the photographs were taken, through correspondence with one of the original photographers.108 pages 4 separate books (B&W, duotone and colour). More on the photobook here
Paintball Field was made during a residency in the ‘schist’ mountain villages of Portugal. The area has become depopulated and is now being developed as a destination for tourists.
PAINTBALL FIELD (3,06 billion cycles per second ): paula roush photography and installation Installation commissioned by Barreiro Photography Month at AMAC Photoworks printed monotone with laser toner on xerox paper and linen, shot (two tones) with a paintball gun (collaboration with GBH), wearables with photoworks printed onto silk cotton, props, foam and mannequin installed on metal and wood structures Red Gallery Auditório Municipal Augusto Cabrita 1 Nov 2018 – 10 Feb 2019
Paintball Field was made during a residency in the ‘schist’ mountain villages of Portugal. The area has become depopulated and is now being developed as a destination for tourists. The title of the work refers to a local recreation area where visiting families come with their children to play war games using guns firing balls of paint. The photographs conjure up a hunting scene in which a female figure wearing a cork mask – resembling those that were used by the original villagers during carnival – is being pursued. More than a simple ironic take on violence and war, the work draws on ethnographic connotations, evoking a dramatic encounter between the rural traditions of the past and present-day cultural practices. (3.06 billion cycles per second is the clock speed of the computer used to create the photoworks, expressed in gigahertz: 3.06 GHz. The computer is only one of the mediating elements in this practice, connected to capturing, editing, printing and publishing devices. An underlying trauma is the feeling of loss: emotional, social and technological. Loss of loved ones, lived spaces and computing power)
The past persists in the present in the form of a dream (participatory architectures, archive, revolution), exhibition view, Paradigm Store, 5 Howick Place, London
Paradigm Store Curated by HS Projects With: Ulla von Brandenburg, Cullinan & Richards, Kendell Geers, David Shrigley, Yutaka Sone, Maria Nepomuceno, Tobias Rehberger,paula roush, Claire Barclay, Elizabeth Neel, Simon Bedwell, Nike Savvas, Theo Stamatoyiannis, Anne Harild, Beatriz Milhazes 5 Howick Place, London [press release] [artist's statement] [review: 3rd Dimension Magazine]
Historical allegories The latest materialisation of the found photo foundation appeared in the installation The past persists in the present in the form of a dream (participatory architectures, archive, revolution) that was exhibited in London in 2014 by HS Projects as part of Paradigm Store, a curatorial project reflecting on the haunting gap between 20th century modernist utopias and historical matrixes that have ripped apart modernist myths of progress. The past… in the form of a dream occupied that gap between the 1970s promises of radical participatory democracy and the contemporary reality of neo-liberal democracy in southern europe, featuring the Apeadeiro housing estate, one of the urban villages developed during the portuguese SAAL architecture programme, and now facing demolition. I was a child in 1974 when the 25th of April coup d’etat put an end to five decades of fascist dictatorship. Within just a few months, the country underwent a fertile incubation period out of which mushroomed a series of experiments in participatory democracy with SAAL symbolising the architecture of the revolution.
Architect Jose Veloso built a SAAL project with a fishing community living in precarious conditions in a small shanty town in Meia Praia, by the seaside of Lagos city. With his team’s support the villagers formed an association and applied for funding and ownership of the land. Forty one houses were built following a ‘modular typology of evolutionary housing.’ The basic unit was the one bedroom flat, and each unit contained five additional options of interior organisation allowing the family to develop the space up to a five bedroom flat, according to their household needs. The architects made the proposals, elaborated the technical aspects of the construction and all decisions were taken in collective meetings, where almost everyone participated: “It was a very cohesive, lucid and coherent group in their decisions. They didn’t want each family to be simply building their own house. Instead, everyone worked in all the houses collectively, and they would all be built at the same time.” (1)
The SAAL programme was eventually dissolved in 1976 by a government invested in joining the prevailing neoliberal capitalist model, in a process of normalisation for the portuguese society where hegemonic models of western-style consensual democracy replaced the participatory experiments put in place during the revolution. The Apeadeiro village was never finished, the streets never paved and the houses are currently threatened with demolition to make space for a new golf course. This happens concurrently with an identified crisis of memory in portuguese history by “getting rid of those formulations that were seen as direct expressions of the vigorous popular movements of the revolutionary period and their achievements,” as Santos and Nunes write (2) and that explains the institutionalisation of a ‘selective’ historical amnesia.
Aesthetic of ruins It is this complex crisis of memory that I attempted to work in the form of another experimental archive, an installation that mixed found photographs with my own photography. In my first field trip to the village, in 2010, I photographed the forty one houses like Ed Ruscha would have photographed every building on the Sunset Strip (3), or the twenty six gasoline stations on Route 66. (4) I created a visually efficient typology, and tactics of ‘typologisation’ are frequent in many other spatial photobooks, as pointed by Ian Walker (5), but it didn’t engage the psycho-historical resonances of the site. I carried on with research at the National Library and Archives in Lisbon where I searched for traces of my case study and found the cotton tape used to bundle-up documents. I eventually cut the houses out of their backgrounds, wrapped them around construction bricks, and re-photographed the series. The fragmentation of the image and the archival cotton tape inserted spatio-temporal gaps in the photographs that result in the creation of a historical allegory. Further, the fragmentation and doubling of photographic material in the installation created, in turn, an archive of participatory architecture and an archive of revolution, that is also an archive of ruins and forgetting.
The difference between typological and allegorical archival installation might be seen, as explained by Craig Owens (6), in such engagement with the psychological and mythical resonances of the site. This along with other strategies as the creation of images through reproduction of other images, an attraction to the imperfect, the impermanent, the ruin that stands for process of decay and abandonment, an obsessive gathering, piling up of fragments, involving the spatial, leads to hybridisation and photomontage and a temporal projection of structure as sequence. Could The past… in the form of a dream installation communicate the time of the construction, the time of the photograph and the time of the archive? It appears to function both as a spatial and a time montage that shifts the viewer’s perception between utopia, ruins, document and monument. The danger with ethnographic approaches is, according to James Cifford (7), the distancing of the represented communities in the ‘salvage paradigm’ that freezes them into a ‘present-becoming-past.’ This is something I have been very wary of, threading my way between documentary and experimental auto-ethnography. However, the allegorical structure of double representation, in which the ethnographing of the culture is recognised and made visible through photography’s reflexivity, complemented by the inclusion of other voices, transforms such ethnographic practices. Catherine Russell also sees this happening in the use of allegory to appropriate utopian desires, as in Walter Benjamin’s radical theory of memory. In her reading of Benjamin’s work, his study of the Paris arcades suggests that the past persists in the present in the form of a dream, often commodified as a wish image; this conception of the past is captured in the shifting temporalities of the reproduced and archived photography and became the title The past persists in the present in the form of a dream (participatory architectures, archive, revolution), for both a newspaper (8) and installation.
In the installation, one of the sculptural clusters looks like a disordered construction site, a visual memory from my first visit to the village, where I saw the poetic debris of everyday life, let out and about in the streets… A wooden frame placed over a shabby linoleum strip evokes both the front of a house and a large light-box, with fluorescent light illuminating a quasi-transparent instance of the brick-house. Moving to the side, there is a defaced nightstand, placed over trestles, as if waiting repair. Hanging from its open door is a double spread from the photo newspaper, with a different brick-house. Other assemblages show construction materials and photo reproductions leaning against it, a homage to the DIY skills of the villagers, that glean iconic trash of late capitalism to repair the deteriorating housing estate. This creolisation, the hybridised appropriation of the globalised culture in a localised vocabulary of forms creates odd juxtapositions, for example, of brick chimneys with macdonalds’s logos. Is this a TAZ, a temporary autonomous zone(9)? A pirates’ encampment that resists state control? Like a rhizome, the TAZ is a node reconfiguring itself in order to enact hit and run resistances. Otherwise how to rethink today SAAL’s ideas on social emancipation?
Surviving archives It is crucial to note here that there is no official archive of the housing estate: a main gap in the residents’ archives is the absence of the official documents that would grant them ownership of the land and houses. In this absence, their position is extremely vulnerable and the creation of such archive appears as a matter of urgency. The inclusion of three large studio trestle tables to display the records of the SAAL architecture along vernacular and personal archives is an act of reparative justice as well as a direct result of the centrality of the fpfoundation in my studio practice. The collection of found material has a very a mobile configuration “in transit and in translation” moving like Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor suggest happens with temporary archival forms, away from “understandings of archives as stable repositories.” (10) Crucially, like the artists’ studios analysed by Jenny Sjöholm (11) my studio can be seen as an experimental archive in itself, with all types of collected objects being taken out and incorporated into installations set-ups, silkscreen prints, photobookzines and other practices that translate the contents of the storage boxes into new patterns that further loose its connection to its original site of production. Thus, not surprisingly, it is frequently impossible to identify the provenance of the photographs on display in any of my installations.
The inclusion of found state photo albums from the fascistic government, alongside Jose Veloso’s architectural archive and with the villagers’ personal archives in the tables query the weight of the archive to legitimise and or destabilise power positions. In the reproductions of the villagers’ photos they appear in their homes, surrounded by their collections of images and artefacts, as collectors and archivists in their own right, aware that in spite of this ordering, they lack the documents that prove their citizenship. Their staging for the camera of their personal archives reveals politically and aesthetically astute use of images, where evidence of citizen’s life is a plea for human rights. These archives of the private sphere show how politicised is the figure of the dispossessed. The image of the villagers as activists can only be complete with the memories of the films and songs that evidence their life in the public sphere, since life in the village has been wrapped up with the codes of ethno-documentary representation and the politics of image since its inception in the 1970s.
As part of the installation, I included a video archive that deals with the village in two different periods. The film Continuar a Viver -Living On (1976) was directed by Antonio Cunha Telles when the filmmaker joined the construction team in 1975. Since 1968 European militant cinema had been filming the working class struggle. Living On is both an ethnographic work and a piece of militant cinema, a politicised documentary of direct cinema, with no leading actors, rather the working class takes stage as the main character. Here, the protagonist is the fishing community performing for the camera as citizens exerting their right to the city, building their own houses collectively and assuming the control over their means of production by establishing a fishing cooperative.
The other video archive moment is a contemporary Youtube playlist of thirty cover versions of the song Indios da Meia Praia (1976). When the protest singer Zeca Afonso (1929 – 1987) wrote the soundtrack for the film he called it Indios da Meia Praia (Indigenous of the Meia Beach) as the Lagos city population called the villagers, a derogatory term that implied both foreigner and subaltern positions. The song appropriates the term to claim an anti bourgeois attitude, and it has been so popular throughout the years, that it has slowly become an anthem for the revolution. So whilst in fact many people have never visited the village, the so called Indios became a legend in its own right and the song regularly reappears as a new cover version in political rallies, TV shows and song contests.
In the site of an empty office building in the borough of Victoria, central London, the viewer’s experience of walking along the archival installation was framed by the background view out of the 6th floor window frames: outside were the red bricks tower of the neo-Byzantine style catholic Westminster cathedral erected in 1903, the dark grey cement cluster of brutalist architecture office buildings built in the mid-1970s, contrasting with the new stainless steel office buildings, a symbol of the present digital economies, with office workers visible at their computer desks. The allegorical archive could be experienced in a total environment of time-space compression at the time of globalisation.(12)
Extract from: paula roush: Chaos of memories- Surviving archives and the ruins of history according to the found photo foundation[access full there here] In Order and Collapse: The Lives of Archives Editors: Gunilla Knape, Niclas Östlind, Louise Wolthers, Tyrone Martinsson, Art & Theory Stockholm 2016
1 From an interview with the architect, video recorded in the summer of 2010. 2 Boaventura de Sousa Santos and João Arriscado Nunes, '”Introduction: Democracy, Participation and Grassroots Movements in Contemporary Portugal,” South European Society and Politics 9:2 (2004), p.11 3 Edward Ruscha, Every Building On the Sunset Strip (Los Angeles, CA: self-published, 1966) 4 Edward Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Alhambra, CA: The Cuningham Press,1962) 5 For a study see Ian Walker “A kind of ‘Huh?’: The siting of twentysix gasoline stations (1962)” in The Photobook: from Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, eds. Patrizia di Bello, Colette Wilson & Shamoon Zamir (London/New York: I.B. Tauris 2012) 111 – 128. 6 As exemplified in the site-specific work of Roberth Smithson and archival accumulations of Hanne Darboven. See Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse- Toward A Theory of Postmodernism, October 12 (Spring, 1980), 71. 7 James Cifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” cited in Catherine Russell, Experimental ethnography – The work of film in the age of video. 8 paula roush, The past persists in the present in the form of a dream (participatory architectures,archive, revolution) (London: msdm publications, 2012); first exhibited during the Brighton Photo Biennial 12 Photobook, October – November 2012 and Brighton Photo Fringe, Phoenix Brighton, November 2012 9 Hakim Bey, T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.(Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1985).See http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ 10 Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, The Archive in Transit, In On the subject of archives. See http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/hirschtaylor 11 Jenny Sjöholm, “The Art Studio As Archive: Tracing The Geography of Artistic Potentiality, Progress and Production,” Cultural Geographies 21(3, 2014), 505– 514. 12 On the question of the national of allegory vs its globalisation using the configuration of timespace compression proposed by Fredric Jameson see Ismail Xavier, “Historical Allegory” in A Companion to Film Theory, eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell, 1999) 333-334.
Torn, Folded, Curled is a working term used at the Arab Image Foundation to categorise heavily damaged photographs that require special care in storage and preservation. It is also the title for a project started with photographic research at the Foundation followed by a publishing residency at PlanBEY that resulted in photobookworks and an exhibition in Beyrut (Makan, 2015). Bayroumi, Super-Private and Today source from three photographic collections that are temporarily stored for preservation, whilst awaiting its full digitisation and cataloguing. Art as Research methodologies support an archaeology of the contemporary past, and reflect the way these orphan photographs exist in a phantasmic connection with Middle East history, chance and everyday life.
Based in Beirut’s Mar Mikhael, Makan was a residential apartment before its conversion into a project space. Relying on the domestic feeling of the site, the gallery was retrofitted into a furnished apartment and the photobook works integrated within a site-specific installation. The staging of a narrative within an out-dated domestic interior invited the audience into an intimist reading of the scenes evoked in the printed pages.
SUPER-PRIVATE This effect is visible with Super-private, six photobookworks sourced from the work of an amateur photographer known as RS. Photographing in the early 1950s in Beyrut, he left his work in film rolls that were never developed during his life time and are shown here as photobookworks for the first time. The ‘real-life’ apartment setting provides the ideal backdrop for a visual script that emerges in the staged scenes for the camera where his friends and lovers feature as characters in a photo-roman noir. More about the book here
TODAY/AL YOM Another bookwork in the exhibition is an investigation of press photographs and papers rescued from the offices of political newspaper Al Yom. Founded by Afif El Tibi in 1937, considered the father of Lebanese journalism, the newspaper was attacked at the outbreak of war in 1975, and the journalists given 30 minutes to leave the offices. The repository lay hidden until the editor’s death in 2005 when it was found outside his house. Heavily damaged, the materials are photographed as they were found: torn, folded and curled. The resulting publication is titled Today (torn folded curled) and the images are accompanied by sentences from the novel ‘A L’ Ombre d’ Une Ville’ (1993) by Elie-Pierre Sabagg, creating a photo-text that is a reflection on memory, photography and the city. More about the book here
BAYROUMI The Bayroumi Collection has been temporarily held in storage boxes at the Arab Image Foundation waiting to be catalogued and re-housed in safe archiving environment, until it is ultimately digitised and made available for online access. It was brought in by AIF member Akram Zaatari, from the studio of Mohamad Bayroumi in Saida, Lebanon and it is still being researched. It is a collection of approximately 4600 negatives of 35mm format, packed in cardboard boxes and plastic bags. More about the book here
ROSITTA Rositta explores what the definition of 'photobook' is: using one single image from the RS collection it is formatted for the dinner table, a humorous twist of the coffe-table book. The photograph is rendered bitmap, a process usually leading to the photo silkscreen surface a condition that is eschewed here in favor of high contrast laser printing, and placed under a transparent acrylic cover with pink stickers. More about the book here
Three “photographic rubbings” made
with graphite crayons on toner monochromatic prints (80gsm Bond paper). They
are hand-embossed imprints of inscriptions of the names of the workers of Gas
Light & Coke Company dead in World Wars I and II. The black and white
powder texture is the result of graphite used to rub the stones in the memorial
garden, in the centre of which a gas lamp burns constantly.
Photographs and rubbings done kneeling and installed knee level 46cm from the floor SIze each photographic rubbing: 59,4 x 84,1cm Photography: paula roush with additional artwork by ina
Installation view of the work “KNEELING (MEMORIAL GARDENS)" msdm studio, Electric House March 2019
paula roush: Decomposition and Other Large Scale Works
09 – 23 December 2017
UN8 London
THE BEAUTIES of DECOMPOSITION, 2017, exhibition view, Hand-made paper specimens displayed on annotated London maps and school desks from Taxi Driving School
Lisbon Vernacular, 2017, Varied papers including Corona offset 120gsm, Variable dimensions, Closed approx 44x 31 cm, exhibition view, Decomposition and Other Large Scale Works, UN8 London
The beauties of DECOMPOSITION, 2017, exhibition view, Decomposition and Other Large Scale Works, UN8 London
Newspaper work
40 pages, colour, digital print, 38 cm x 29 cm with original text (12 pages booklet)
Edition of 100, numbered and signed
Areopagitica (Milton’s Nose) is a newsprint publication made of two earlier publishing projects: Russian Ballet Riot, a newspaper work about David Bomberg’s pamphlet Russian Ballet * and Areopagitica, a newspaper work about John Milton’s pamphlet Areopagitica. ** The resulting newsprint publication, titled Areopagitica (Milton’s Nose) blends collages from the pages of Russian Ballet Riot with collages from the pages of Areopagitica, plus additional documentation of the newspaper works with objects - clay noses created by St Paul’s school students- as a table installation at Milton’s gallery. John Milton (1608- 1674) was a student at St Paul’s School, and wrote Areopagitica in 1644 in defense of an unlicensed free press. David Bomberg (1890 – 1957) was a teacher at London South Bank University (Borough Polytechnic Institute) and published Russian Ballet (1919), inspired by Diaghilev'sBallets Russes for the company’s London performance.
* Published as part of the exhibition David Bomberg: Objects of Collection, at the Digital Gallery, London South Bank University, 10-12 December 2013 ** Published as part of the exhibition Art in a Book Shell: A survey of artists working with and inspired by books, at the Milton Gallery, St Paul’s School, London, 26 February – 17 March 2015
Installation table assemblage with newsprint publications Russian Ballet and Areopagitica with clay noses created by students at St. Paul’s School 80cm x 150 cm x 72 cm overall installation Art in a Book Shell: A survey of artists working with and inspired by books exhibition Milton Gallery, St Paul’s School, London 2015
Installation table assemblage with newsprint publication Areopagitica(Milton's Nose) with clay noses 80cm x 150 cm x 72 cm overall installation. Unbound exhibition, Herbert Read Gallery, University of the Ceative Arts Canterbury 2017
Temporary public artwork with Coleman Project Space in the site of former Biscuit town, Bermondsey entitled SOS:OK Emergency Biscuit, which allowed former workers of the Biscuit Factory to imagine and design a new biscuit to represent their neighborhood.
Bermondsey, in south-east London, was once affectionately known as Biscuit Town. Home to some of the largest biscuit factories in the country, it provided employment to generations of local families. Now it’s a very different story. The biscuit factories have closed, and many of their former employees are unemployed. The only businesses that come into Bermondsey now are the large property developers buying up old factories and turning them into gated residences for well-paid workers at nearby Canary Wharf.
MEMORY FACTORY First part of the project consisted in setting up a Memory factory in place of the former Peek Frean’s Biscuit Factory, announced as ‘a reopening of the factory for one week only as a memory factory.’ The workshops investigated the factory’s history,gathering archive material. Peek Frean former workers were invited to come to contribute their memories of Biscuit Town. They arrived with memorabilia which filled the project space turning it into a display of selected photos, clothing, gifts, books, films, sound samples and journal entries that mapped the space of memory.
SOS:OK BISCUIT A new emergency biscuit, cooked to a specially designated recipe, was created to be distributed to visitors to the gallery and on the streets of Bermondsey. Crates of biscuits were distributed by horse and cart on Tower Bridge Road and on the Blue. The exercise was partly a reference to a relief operation of 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. When the prussians lifted their siege of Paris, Peek Freans supplied thousands of biscuits to the starving citizens. The exhibition at the Coleman ProjectSpace was staged as a relief operation, also a response to the hunger crisis which comprises an international emergency.
SOS:OK was featured in the exhibition Public Services along with the work of Marjetica Potrč, Apolonija Šušteršič, Temporary Services (USA) and Tadej Pogacar & Anja Planiscek, representing the way artists today think about structures and forms in contemporary cities.
Public Services presents five different starting points for engagement and five
explicitly subjective approaches. These projects and creative proposals have
been conceived as forms of immediate and physical intervention in the structure
of the city, as social interaction, as a virtual utopian scheme. They represent
a critical consideration of alternative models of public services, which,
ideally, are founded on the principles of openness, access, equality,
participation, mobility, adaptability, and transformativity.
When artists today think about structures and forms in the contemporary city, they think above all about the importance of open communication within urban structures.By occupying the space that lies between the many different city users, corporate capital (and its interests), and the urban structure, the[se projects] draw attention to processes of degradation and appropriation, borders between public and private, deindustrialization and precarity, while developing new public-service models based on participation, exchange, and solidarity.
Photographic silkscreen prints on Fabriano paper, mono and duotones wall installation, 24 prints, with 5 film acetates, 242 cm x 340 cm shelf installation, 16 busts with folios, 22cm x 458 cm x 20 cm
Photobookwork Tender Cups (10 found bras with 10 poems about absent breasts) 54 pages, 16,75 x 24cm (folded) Book block: Colour laser print, monotone process on157gsm matt paper, unbound Loose folios: 10 photographs and 10 visual poems in 20 folds + assorted inserts Cover: silkscreen print wrap on 200 gsm fabriano paper Edition of 1
Tender Cups contains two collections: "Found Bras" and "Absent Breasts". Whilst the photographs of bras are presented as mono and duotone prints, the textual elements are visually composed as breasts-sentences that supplement the absence of bodies from the printed pages.
Sources: -visual: 10 bras found on the street and individually photographed in the genre of studio portrait. Processed in photoshop and printed in different sizes and substrates using xerographic and silkscreen printing -textual: 10 poems on absent breasts, with words sampled from a range of discourses from autobiography, testimony, art history, medical case studies, lingerie advertising, feminist and queer gender studies and social media. -title: hommage to Gertrude Stein, 1914 Tender Buttons
As a visual object that adopts the form of the book, TENDER CUPS doesn’t fit into neat book categories (as a photobook or a literary book) the same way ‘breasts’ destabilise binary definitions of genre/sexuality, and fit/healthy bodies. Format and binding invoke the chest in a non-binary way, both symmetric and assymetric, flat and three-dimensional.
The exhibition comprises works of four artists who work within the boundaries of the Artist Book, outlining the diverse nature of the book format, from sequential narrative to mapping and code to installation and interactive pieces. The common thread of the book is also expressed in the artist’s production methods through various print methods and sequencing within their work.
The Beauties of DECOMPOSITION, exhibition views, Herbert Read Gallery Canterbury
Bookwork The Beauties of DECOMPOSITION Vitrine installation Unbound exhibition views, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury
By the gallery entrance, a museological display case contains The Beauties of Decomposition, collaboration with Michael Hampton. Concept-specific paper is a refined substrate in the world of the artists’ book. The logic of the work is materially inscribed in the fibres of handmade paper. In the case of The Beauties of Decomposition, the paper’s meaning is derived from ‘The Book Dispersed’ project. This special edition contains a paper specimen composed of pulp from the abortive funding application for ‘The Book Dispersed’ an exhibition devised by the collective Media Instaveis/Unstable Media I am part of, blended with pulp from Michael Hampton’s magnum opus Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artist’s book (author’s copy), together with extra pulp from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (a print on demand copy purchased on eBay). The book, dedicated to the late Auto-Destructive artist and activist Gustav Metzger, is a work about dispersion in the form of a conversation between scattering and collecting/organising.
At the centre of the exhibition are four new editions of Flora McCallica. These works- two hanging installations and two books on display tables- have historical and biographical references, mixing orphan photographs dated 1958 found in the Lisbon flea market, and botanical specimens from an herbarium dated 1920s discarded by London Kew Gardens. Like pieces of evidence altered by the passage of time, the silkscreen and stone lithography prints have stains and patterns that are unique to each print.
Participatory architectures (how to build your own living structures) 240 x 120 x 70 cm sculpture made of two oversize book covers (photographic digital print on canvas, wood binding), newspaper Participatory architectures, 12 pages, colour, photography on newsprint, 29cm ×38 cm, metal structure base, two linear lights with fluorescent tubes, wiring.
Another work recreated for this exhibition is Participatory architectures (how to build your own living structures), a work inspired by the outdated remains of a 20th century architectural utopia, a village developed as part of national housing project code-named SAAL, the experimental programme of peoples’ right to place emerged in the short experience of participatory democracy during the Portuguese revolution. The sculpture includes two oversize book covers referring to the Self-build movement in Portugal and the USA, and the newspaper The past persists in the present in the form of a dream (participatory architectures, archive and revolution) documenting a SAAL village facing extinction.
Areopagitica (Milton’s Nose), installation view, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury
Areopagitica (Milton’s Nose)is a table assemblage with self-published newspaper and clay noses created by students at St. Paul’s School ceramic studios. Through collage, studio portraiture and found material, the work references two earlier self-published pamphlets: John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica and David Bomberg’s 1919 Russian Ballet.
found photo foundation: installation detail, photozines produced in the publishing workshop with Siegen-based artists-educators, Dear Aby Warburg: What can be done with images? Dealing with Photographic Material, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
Dear Aby Warburg: What can be done with images? Dealing with Photographic Material
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen Curated by Eva Schmidt With: Özlem Altin, Tobias Buche, Mariana Castillo Deball, Marianna Christofides, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Katalin Deér, Thea Djordjadze, Hervé Garcia, Cécile Hummel, Franziska Kabisch, Ulrike Kuschel, Alexandra Leykauf, Elke Marhöfer, Katrin Mayer, Lia Perjovschi, Manfred Pernice, Abigail Reynolds, paula roush, Ines Schaber & Stefan Pente, Eske Schlüters, Batia Suter, Simon Wachsmuth and Haegue Yang
Found Photo Foundation installation in Dear Aby Warburg: What can be done with images? Dealing with Photographic Material, exhibition curated by Eva Schmidt, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
found photo foundation: installation detail, photozines produced in the publishing workshop with Siegen-based artists-educators, Dear Aby Warburg: What can be done with images? Dealing with Photographic Material, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
The exhibition Dear Aby Warburg, What Can Be Done with Images? shows 22 younger positions of contemporary art that handle photographs—usually photographic reproductions or found photos—in a specific fashion. Starting out from an enduring fascination with the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg, this reference in the title also pays homage to the ‘artistic’ art historian. While two projects refer in a concrete way to the work of Aby Warburg, the references of the other works are more associative in character. Today—from the viewpoint of contemporary art—we value Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas because it displays variable, non-systematic ordering parameters, but also because the combination of divergent picture sources and their carrying materials and fixtures—as an aesthetic unity—appears extremely provisional and haptic. The new availability of reproductions in Warburg’s time suggested the examination of images and their potential for making a statement in conjunction with other images, and the proposal and testing of hypotheses with the aid of such ensembles. Today, the availability of reproduced images is taken for granted more than ever. An interest in photographic material, in the carriers of this material, or in the spatial staging of such material—temporal sequences in slide projections and film as well—cannot be overlooked in current art practice. Besides collection, accumulation, archiving and ordering processes, the exhibition also shows hybrid combinations of photographic material with painting and sculpture. Photographic material in combination with other artistic media makes clear how we can conceive the discursive potentials of photography beyond the constellation of the individual image or the series. Expressive arrangements, interweaving, montages and formations reveal the ways in which photographic images can be made to speak. The meaning of a photographic image does not lie in the image itself; its context and actualization are decisive. The way artists deal with images, as the exhibition will show, is a practice that is both aesthetic and ethical.
msdm is Mobile Strategies of Display & Mediation a nomadic House — Studio — Gallery for photographic art curatorial research, expanded practice of the artist's book photobook publishing and peer - to - peer collaborations
by appointment only please e-mail to schedule a visit
paula roush founder
paularoush@gmail.com
House—Studio—Gallery London SE
msdm@msdm.org.uk
school of arts & creative industries london south bank university
