Following the live performance of Janice Kerbel's major new artwork 'Sink’, commissioned by The Common Guild as part of Festival 2018, we are delighted to present an extension of the project with a series of double-sided prints that further explore the language of synchronisation.

'Sink' is a synchronised swimming routine for 24 women, which was first presented on 3 August 2018 in the distinctive surroundings of the Western Baths, a Victorian swimming pool in Glasgow. Using synchronisation to explore the tensions between body and language, movement and stillness, the individual and the collective, the prints act as a score for and record of a performance. Kerbel treats paper as the surface of water, notating moves and arrangements by hand with use of rubber stamps.

Kerbel regularly works with printed form to invoke real and suggested action. Text-based works such as 'Fight' (2018), a series of silkscreen prints, score an unarmed fight for a group of individuals, while 'Remarkable' (2007), a series of silkscreen prints taking 19th-century fairground posters as its inspiration, heralds the arrival of a series of imagined characters. These printed works both document and instruct action that may or may not have taken place, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, description and premonition.

Project Details

Read the Commentary by Minty Donald –

‘Radio Piombino’ is an exhibition of new, sculptural works by artist Katinka Bock. Bock works with a range of materials, including natural substances, such as copper, lead and clay, and found or given forms. Her materials are often altered through natural processes and the effects of time – heat, moisture or sunlight, for example – such that the potential of becoming or disintegrating seems constantly present. Her sculptures appear as the result of events, at times seeming precarious and at others immutable.

Bock often takes the peculiarities or context of a given space as a starting point for her work, and her project for Glasgow taps into the nature of 21 Woodlands Terrace as a domestic building and the history of Glasgow as a major port, a place of exchange and transaction. Prior to the exhibition several parts of these works inhabited the city of Glasgow and its environs. Copper oxidised; fabric was exposed to the elements; ceramic forms ‘lived’ with city-centre residents and businesses, or were secreted in the woods above Loch Lomond. Bock gathers these elements in their transformed state, looping the references of geological, industrial, meteorological and personal history into her working materials, seeking to reflect the systems that produced the materials, place and people. 'Radio Piombino’ re-imagines 21 Woodlands Terrace as a landscape of sculptural elements that turn the building into what Bock terms a "poisoned body”.

Katinka Bock is a Paris-based, German artist. ‘Radio Piombino’ is the first presentation of her work in Scotland and follows her only previous project in the UK, ‘Mesonya’, with Siobhan Davies Dance (London) in 2017.

The exhibition is presented as part of Glasgow International 2018 and follows our previous Glasgow International exhibitions with leading international artists including Gabriel Kuri (2014) and Akram Zaatari (2016) and will be accompanied by a series of related talks and events.

Further Info

Documents

Katinka Bock interviewed by Calum Sutherland, Artforum, April 2018
Katinka Bock, 'Radio Piombino' reviewed by Chris Sharratt, Frieze, April 2018
Louise Long reviews Katinka Bock, 'Radio Piombino', Vogue, April 2018
Neil Cooper, 'GI Reviews and Responses, MAP, May 2018

Press Release
Exhibition Information

Project Details

‘Radio Piombino’ was presented as part of Glasgow International 2018. The exhibition was supported by Creative Scotland, Glasgow City Council, Goethe Institute, Glasgow and the Alliance Française, Glasgow.

Read the Commentary by Moira Jeffrey –

Room for Reading features publications about and selected by exhibiting artists in our programme.

During 2018 Room for Reading recommendations focus on exhibiting artists Katinka Bock, whose exhibition ‘Radio Piombino’ is presented at 21 Woodlands Terrace from 20 April - 8 July; and Janice Kerbel, whose synchronised swimming project ‘SINK’ takes place at The Western Baths Club on 3 August.

We have selected three publications on the work of German sculptor Katinka Bock in the run up to the artist’s solo exhibition 'Radio Piombino' at The Common Guild later this year.

Katinka Bock, 'Intenso' (2018), an artist’s book conceived as a prelude to three exhibitions 'Tomorrow’s Sculpture' at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Mudam Luxembourg, and Institut d’art contemporain, (Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes); 'Pazifik' (2014) published on the occasion of 'A and I' at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; and 'ANY' (2016), an artist book released in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Warum ich mich in eine Nachtigall verwandelt habe’ at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland.

Watch a short film from the exhibition Katina Bock, ‘Tomorrow’s Sculpture’ at Institut d’art contemporain here.

For the first of her selections, Katinka Bock recommends 'The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things' (1962) by George Kubler, Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ (1914-17) and Stefan Zweig’s 'Decisive Moments in History' (1927).

When it was first released ‘The Shape of Time’ presented a radically new approach to the study of art history, replacing the widely accepted notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time.

Kafka’s ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ or “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” is a puzzling short story of a creature called “Odradek”. The falsely allegorical tale has drawn many interpretations, from Marxist capitalist critique, to a metaphor for the act of writing itself.

First published in English in 1940, 'Decisive Moments in History' is an illustrated history book describing 14 key moments in history, from Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, to the start of the Russian Revolution.

Read 'The Shape of Time' here.
Read ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ here.
View a photo gallery illustrating Stefan Zweig’s twelve decisive moments here.

Katinka Bock selects two books on materiality: ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality’ (2015), edited by Petra Lange-Berndt and Karen Barad, 'Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning' (2007) .

‘Materiality’ features writing by Judith Butler and Tim Ingold, and includes artists Jimmie Durham, Zoe Leonard and Kara Walker in an investigation of artistic practice that is concerned with disrupting social norms, and expanding notions of time and space.

The theoretical physicist and feminist Karen Barad elaborates her concept of “agential realism” in 'Meeting the Universe Halfway'. Barad offers an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, significantly reworking understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

Read a selection of pages from ‘Materiality’ here.
Read 'Meeting the Universe Halfway' here.

This month Katinka Bock recommends, ‘The Sound of Distance' (2009) from her eponymous site-specific work at De Vleeshal, the Netherlands in 2009, and ‘Zarba Lonsa, _0_0__0, Mesonya’ (2018), a catalogue of three solo-exhibitions by Bock that were linked to 'Zarba Lonsa', a series of sculptures, installation, films and photos instigated during her residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers in Paris in 2016.

Bock also selects the novel 'Vertigo' by German author W.G. Sebald (1990; English translation 2000. Described by Stephen Moss as “a curious mix of travelogue, literary essay, philosophical reflection and fictive exploration”, ‘Vertigo’ is W.G Sebald’s first novel and the last to be translated into English. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator, whose journey across Europe invokes ghosts of literary figures of the past, drawing the reader, line by line, into a dizzying web of history, biography, legends, and memory.

Watch W.G. Sebald speak about his work here.

In the first of Janice Kerbel’s Room for Reading recommendations, the Canadian artist selects her own publications 'Deadstar' (2006) and ‘LIVE’ (2018) along with Charles Sprawson’s 'Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero' (1992).

‘Deadstar’ is a limited edition publication that accompanied ‘Deadstar: Ghosttown’ a copperplate photogravure etching by the artist. The etching takes the form of a town plan to envisage a timeless settlement for ghosts, and the publication includes essays by Mark Godfrey and Susan Morgan, and an extract from Lyall Watson’s ‘Supernature’.

Kerbel’s 'LIVE' brings together three scripts and one score written over ten years. Performative works assembled in this book are ‘Nick Silver Can’t Sleep’, a radio play for insomniacs in the voices of six nocturnal plants; ‘Kill the Workers!’, a play for stage lights inspired by dramatic narrative; ‘Doug’, a live vocal performance of nine songs for six voices; and ‘Ballgame’, a radio announcement of a baseball game conceived by mathematical averages.

Charles Sprawson, himself an obsessional swimmer, explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water in 'Haunts of the Black Masseur’. From Classical Greece to Virginia Woolf, Sprawson offers anecdotes of great swimming heroes.

Read more about ‘Deadstar’ here.
Listen to ‘Nick Silver Can’t Sleep’ featured in ‘LIVE’ here.
Watch a film adaptation of 'Haunts of the Black Masseur’ here.

This month Janice Kerbel has selected 'A History of Synchronised Swimming' (2014) by Synthia Sydnor and 'The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool' Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen (1998).

Sydnor’s 2014 article for the journal Body Politics is a meditation on the form and essence of synchronized swimming. van Leeuwen’s 'The Springboard in the Pond’ investigates the swimming pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin and recreation. This text looks at the domestic swimming pool and discovers an icon through which to read 20th-century modernism.

Read 'A History of Synchronised Swimming' here.
Watch a lecture by Thomas van Leeuwen on The Springboard in the Pond here.

Details

Room for Reading is a space to engage with research related to our programme as recommended by the artists and collaborators we work with at The Common Guild.

Books are suggested in conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events.

Artists’ selections are added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.

The Room for Reading at 21 Woodlands Terrace was open on the first Thursday of every month. Designed by artist Andrew Miller the reference library was open from lunchtime until late, with tea and coffee provided.

"I am for adjectives like beezer, dreich, quare, and nouns like clart, drouth, gleed, mizzle, oxters, scoot-hole, smoor, and verbs like boke, fissle, greet, hunker, swither, and adverbs like furnenst."

Maria Fusco

'Dialecty' has been conceived by writer Maria Fusco to consider the critical uses of vernacular forms of speaking and writing. The project explores the occurrences and potential uses of dialect words, syntax and language within the field of contemporary art and questions traditional orthodoxies of creative and critical writing within contemporary art.

Fusco writes “I am for non-standard English language as a legitimate and enriching form of critical and creative writing which does not take modalities of criticality as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity."

In 2017 a cycle of events with Lisa Robertson, Dr Lauren Hall-Lew and Scott Hames will be presented at The Common Guild. A series of chapbooks with writing by Harry Josephine Giles & Martin O’Leary, Robert McClean, Helen Nisbet, Lisa Robertson, Adam Pendleton and Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams will be launched in 2018.

Maria Fusco is an award-winning Belfast born writer based in Glasgow, working across fiction, criticism and theory, her work is translated into ten languages. Her latest work are the performance ECZEMA! (National Theatre Wales, 2018) is described in Frieze as "an extraordinary text", and the books Legend of the Necessary Dreamer (London: Vanguard Editions, 2017) as “a new classic of female philosophical fiction” by Chris Kraus and Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writings (LA/Vancouver: New Documents, 2017) of which James Elkins had written "Maria Fusco is one of the most inventive and informed practitioners of art writing... After a book like this, most nonfiction seems curiously unaware of what writing can be." Master Rock is a repertoire for a mountain, commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4, the experimental radio play has been experienced by more than 2.5 million listeners. She is a Professor at Northumbria University, previously a Reader in Interdisciplinary Writing at University of Edinburgh and Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Further Info

Additional Links

The ‘Dialecty’ chapbooks series is available from Bookworks.

‘Dialecty’ is funded by the University of Edinburgh and the Elephant Trust.

Supported by

Project Details

‘Dialecty’ chapbooks are co-published by Book Works and The Common Guild, as part of Co-series.

Listen to ‘Dialecty’ here –