Lorenzo Menegazzo

Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River* was an exhibition, running from 11th May - 16th July 2022, a public programme, which took place on 13th and 14th May, and an accompanying publication, at LUX, London.

The exhibition and programme called upon artists to expand the public’s horizons of temporal divides of past, present and future. Arising from the urgency of the global pandemic which has caused us to question the dominance of linear time, the artists investigated different subjectivities of time through moving image, live performance, workshops and text. The film-based exhibition was dedicated to the British Kenyan artist and activist, Grace Ndiritu (b.1982), whose practice is deeply concerned with our contemporary world, seeing it through the twin lenses of healing and spirituality, by finding alternative ways of living. Her archive of over forty 'hand-crafted' videos; post-hippie, pop-abstraction collages and shamanic performances reflect her alternative ways of looking and seeing the world through spiritual practice.

Inviting audiences to immerse themselves in Ndiritu’s two films: “A Week in the News: 7 Places We Think We Know, 7 News Stories We Think We Understand” (2010) and “Black Beauty” (2021), the exhibition reflected the artist’s explorations of “deep time”. The two works stood in dialogue with each other to enable the viewers to witness a continuity and development between the artist’s ideas across eleven years. Ndiritu’s intermediary film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (2015) was screened online for the first week of the exhibition. Her films blur the lines between different time frames and explore themes of media, authorship and historical narratives, whilst expanding on notions of temporality.

Grace Ndiritu’s debut short film “Black Beauty” has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022), 32nd FIDMarseille (2022), and British Art Show 9 (2022). Most recently her work has been featured at Flat Time House (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021/2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Kunsthal Gent (2021).

*Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River’s title was derived from Borges’ theories on the fluidity of time. Borges features as a fictional protagonist in Ndiritu’s “Black Beauty”, and his notion of “An Absolute River” was inspired by Heraclitus’ “No man ever steps in the same river twice”.

In the accompanying public programme, artists Rieko Whitfield, Serena Huang and Dr Jason Allen-Paisant guided audiences through an atemporal journey. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ ideas around the mysterious nature of time, the exhibition and programme explored alternative ideas of time to deconstruct widely accepted linear narratives.

The three contributors in the live programme each deal with critical conceptions of time in their practice. Visitors to the workshop led by Rieko Whitfield reflected on past histories through non-linear writing activities and guided meditation. Serena Huang invited her participants to reimagine potential futures using found objects to create a temporary work of theatrical art. Performing a soundscape with spoken word, Dr Jason Allen-Paisant explored the ways in which sound evades temporal categorisation and affects us differently to visual representations. The audience was invited to contemplate an unfinished past and imagine futures beyond linear time. The accompanying publication “Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River” offered different perspectives of temporality, and gave audiences opportunities to interact with these themes in a tangible and enduring way.

Lorenzo Menegazzo is a visual artist who moved to curating driven by the idea of expanding his creativity into the wider exhibition space, beyond the bounded surface of an artwork. By carefully navigating the practice of the artist-curator, he is able to weave together the most diverse disciplines, with the aim of staging immersive theatrical environments where the everyday life could dissolve in the emphatic encounter with the objects on display and with the other participants.

Lorenzo is committed to redressing what he perceives as a rampant tendency in the curatorial field, oriented towards the intellectual and the discursive, back towards a more affective encounter between the participants and the artworks. Following an unforgettable personal experience, he firmly believes that an encounter with a “real” work of art is never tranquil, but rather a profoundly unsettling experience for the viewer. What he defines as the trauma induced by the artwork, is capable of subverting our reassuring and theatrical representation of the plane of reality.

Lorenzo’s understandings have been profoundly influenced by the poetics of the Italian artist and fellow citizen Claudio Parmiggiani, who has made evident why it is urgent in our social context to turn the exhibition space into an evocative place for the soul rather than an aseptic white-cube environment. Hence, in his dissertation Lorenzo sustains how through a poetic and abstract use of curatorial tools such as the architecture of the setting, the natural light, and silence; the curator is able to profoundly enhance the emotional encounter with the artwork.

Yet, while being aware of the big issues afflicting our hyper-modernity, Lorenzo applies the metaphor of the trace to his curatorial research, as he strives to address those problems that don’t find appropriate visibility in the daily stream of news.

As we often have the impression that the world around us is turning into a heavy rock, Lorenzo is convinced that Art provides ways to elude this lifeless and seemingly inevitable petrification. To this extent, his curatorial research is grounded in the space opened by the contraposition between heaviness and lightness which he considers as the ability of flying up and out of the panopticon of fixed meaning and moral surveillance.

Mythologies of Memory

“Mythologies of Memory” is a writing workshop and guided meditation led by multidisciplinary artist Rieko Whitfield.

Whitfield invites workshop participants to unravel the illusion of the self, decolonising lived experience from the hegemony of linear time. Participants will employ propositional storytelling to navigate the mythologies of personal identity within shared political landscapes. Memories, affect, and the ritual of writing open portals to reimagining collective narratives.

“Mythologies of Memory” was created in response to the fictional interview with writer Jorge Luis Borges in Grace Ndiritu’s moving image work Black Beauty (2020).

Rieko Whitfield (b. 1992, Japan) weaves immersive worlds with speculative mythologies in her tentacular practice spanning performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, music, and text.

Her storytelling decentres narratives of Western, capitalist individualism toward beyond-human collectivism. She is an MA graduate of the Royal College of Art and founding director of the performance art platform Diasporas Now.

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Workshop

Pantemporal Intimacies: For Life Outside of Racialised Time

Performing a soundscape with spoken word, Dr Jason Allen-Paisant explores the ways in which sound evades temporal categorisation and affects us differently to visual representations. The audience is invited to contemplate an unfinished past and imagine futures beyond linear time.

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Spoken Word Performance

Staging Theatricality in Mundanities

The workshop explored the theatrical moment between humans, objects, and everyday life. Revisiting our relationship with our environment, and objects, participants are encouraged to find different ways of interacting with the found objects, space, light and time. Participants looked at the relationship between seemingly irrelevant things, and stage the coincidental moments which activate the theatricality in our everyday life. Through a series of presentations and micro-tasks, participants produced a two to five minutes performance in groups of four people.

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Workshop

Performance Time Workshop

Lorenzo Menegazzo

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Social

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