8 February - 24 March 2013
Preview: Thursday 7 February 2013,
6.30 - 8.30pm
Chisenhale Gallery presents a newly commissioned work by Corin Sworn (MFA 2009). This will be Sworn’s largest and most
ambitious exhibition to date and comprises a film presented as part of
an installation with synchronised lighting and sound.
The Rag
Papers (2013) explores the nature of attention, reuse and
appropriation. The film’s worried narrative shifts between the
perspectives of three characters who interact with a series of objects
set within carefully designed domestic interiors. The film uses point of
view shots and cutaway sequences to suggest the roaming nature of each
character’s attention and in turn, reveals transient spaces such as
hotel rooms, sorting depots and markets.
Layering multiple
subjective viewpoints, Sworn’s characters shift back and forth between
modes of remembering, looking, processing and reading. Objects play a
central role in the film, almost as characters in their own right; the
mise en scene becoming as potent as the action of the protagonists or
any suggested narrative.
In recent work, such as the performance
lecture
Roaming Charges (2011), and
HDHB (2011), made
in collaboration with Charlotte Prodger, Sworn has explored the global
circulation of objects and images. She expands upon these ideas in
The
Rag Papers with the inclusion of footage shot in second hand goods
warehouses – vast repositories where post-consumer textiles and
household goods are sorted for reuse and shipped to locations around the
world. Here the past trails into the present as objects are recycled
across place and time.
Sworn is interested in the means by which
artefacts are borrowed, adapted and reconfigured to tell different
stories. Her work explores the social ordering of attention and how the
erratic nature of perception might undermine control. Sworn’s films and
installations often incorporate found images, over which she voices her
own narratives, themselves composed from fragments of other texts.
In
The Rag Papers Sworn continues this use of appropriation but
renegotiates its terms. In producing the film she worked with the actors
to devise a set of actions in an apartment, and then hired two
documentary filmmakers to shoot the rehearsed sequences as if they were
making a documentary film. Sworn edited the resulting footage to create a
narrative which vaguely apes that of a genre film. She has described
the work as ‘a seedy noir film that wishes it was an intellectual
thriller’.
Corin Sworn (born 1977, London) lives and works in Glasgow. Recent
exhibitions include;
Endless Renovation, ‘Art Now’, Tate
Britain (2011); Tramway, Glasgow; Glasgow International Festival of
Visual Art; Witte de With, Rotterdam (all 2010);
EASTinternational,
Norwich; Kunsthalle Basel (all 2009); Participant Inc. New York (2008).
Sworn was nominated for The Jarman Award 2011 and The Jerwood / Film
and Video Umbrella Award 2012, and has been selected to represent
Scotland at the Venice Biennale, 2013.
The Rag Papers is co-commissioned by Neuer Aachener
Kunstverein (NAK) where the exhibition will be presented in April 2013.
