I didn’t think it would turn out this way, Am I an Object, part IV at P/////AKT

Artists: Aman Sandhu, Anne-Marie Copestake, Clarinda Tse, Margaret Salmon, Mathew Wayne Parkin and Renèe Helèna Browne, with Harriet Rose Morley and Bo Wielders

Exhibition title: I didn’t think it would turn out this way, Am I an Object, part IV

Organized by: David Dale Gallery

Venue: P/////AKT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: November 13 – December 19, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and P/////AKT, Amsterdam

The title for this exhibition, programmed by David Dale Gallery as part of an organi-sational exchange with P/////AKT, is taken from the opening words of Lauren Ber-lant’s introduction in a special edition of Critical Inquiry from 1998 entitled ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’. This focus on intimacy as well as desire, togetherness, presence and absence opens reading into the mechanics of each moving image work but also provides a political underpinning to the programme as a whole. To exist as a limited group of objects bundled together, to act as a subjective survey of sorts, a round-up of activity by artists making moving image work in Glasgow in 2021, is an intimate affair.

Intimacy is, as Berlant describes, ‘an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.’ It is inherently an optimistic endeavour but one that is riddled with tacit fantasies, rules and the inconvenient complication that we cannot guarantee a favourable outcome. Within this desired shared agreement our private concerns are held towards and within the public domain, evidencing a hegemonic spatial taxonomy of public and private, as concretised by a Victorian fantasy of un/controllable binaries, e.g. the public as work, male, hetero, coloniser, and the private as a space for family, the fe-male, queer, colonised.

In I you me we us (2018) Margaret Salmon centres moments of longing and physical togetherness; personal accounts of the influence of inheritance and monstrosity are exposed in Daddy’s Boy (2020) by Renèe Helèna Browne; and local histories con-sidering the necessity for communal recognition are recorded in A love (2019) by Anne-Marie Copestake. In Textures Gestures Meshes Measures (2021), Clarinda Tse considers desires for and experiments with occupation as a form of resistance; Aman Sandhu presents efforts towards a proximity and reshaping of personal-his-torical narratives in The Magic Roundabout (2021); and Mathew Parkin defines mo-ments of lack, grief and detachment (of the self or another) in Vaseline (2018).

In early modern Western Europe, the bourgeois creation of an intimate and demo-cratic ‘public sphere’ (as Jürgen Habermas defined it in The Structural Transfor-mation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society (1962)), as evidenced within salons and cafés allowed a new liberal society to exercise their social critical function. The cinema–or a space for viewing films like this one–is an environment which generates both an active intimate engagement and a collective experience, where entertainment and pleasure are unapologetically bound and problematised.

Harriet Rose Morley’s designs for chairs and tables constructed in collaboration with Bo Wielders, make this viewing space both active and communal. The viewer is in – vited to pull up a chair to watch the films or read this publication (maybe at one of the tables) or take a moment. Built in response to the screening programme and with consideration to the differing lengths of the moving image works, the furniture speaks to Morley’s concerns around accessibility, care, and challenging dominant methodologies – her maxim to be ‘always under construction’.

As Berlant states, intimacy is a destabilising action in its instantiation of a desire for something better that is often in opposition to the norm. Not a disruption of personal and collective desires, as hegemonic powers would believe, but optimistic and aspi-rational outside of neoliberal intention. To hum with Berlant: ‘to rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living.’

There will be a publication available at P/////AKT and online featuring writing by Aman Sandhu, Mathew Wayne Parkin and Margaret Salmon, and designed by Phoebe Kerr. I didn’t think it would turn out this way has been programmed by Cait-lin Merrett King, Programme Coordinator at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, as the first part in an organisational exchange with P/////AKT, Amsterdam who will present an exhibition at David Dale Gallery in early 2022.

The Artist’s Library

The Artist’s Library is a growing collection of titles that have, in one way or another, been relevant to the artist’s practice. They will be on view during the exhibition and become part of the P/////AKTSALON collection of books afterwards. David Dale Gal-lery highly recommends:

– Lauren Berlant, A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages, Cultural Anthropology, Volume 26, Issue 4, 2011.
– Lauren Berlant, Intimacy: A Special Issue, Critical Inquiry, Volume 24, No. 2, 1998.
– Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds, Duke University Press, 2019

About P/////AKT

P/////AKT is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the oppor-tunity to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.

P/////AKT provides a platform for exceptional, emerging artistic talents, who distin-guish themselves through their unique and authentic language and who are capable of giving a different view on the current way of thinking. They are stimulated to work out new developments and are given the opportunity to present their work to a rele-vant audience. Furthermore, P/////AKT always asks the artists to produce new work that relates to the specific nature and dimensions of the given space and to present their own mental space as an overall presentation within the given context.

I didn’t think it would turn out this way, David Dale Gallery (Aman Sandhu, Anne-Marie Copestake, Clarinda Tse, Margaret Salmon, Mathew Wayne Parkin and Renèe Helèna Browne, with Harriet Rose Morley and Bo Wielders), Am I an Object, part IV, installation views and details, P/////AKT, 2021. Photographs by Charlott Markus, courtesy of P/////AKT Amsterdam