work-VBT

2016 - Variations on a Ballisitic Theme | three screen videoinstallation 90 minutes

Variations on a Ballisitic Theme

Variations on a Ballistic Theme is a video trilogy and sculptural installation by Paul Eachus and Nooshin Farhid, with improvised incidental music by David Ben White. Central to the installation is a ninety-minute cycle of video works in three parts, completed and extended by Farhid following the passing of Eachus. This body of work combines installations, animations, texts and moving images, working with on and offline material.

Eachus’ work mainly comprised drawings, photoworks and installations, while Farhid’s work is primarily concerned with the moving image, installations and the production of texts. The artists’ practices overlap through an interest in collage and fragmentation: a form of critical engagement within which the idea of meaning can be unfixed, unrestrained and multiple.

Having a long history of collaboration in curatorial projects as well as artistic production Eachus and Farhid decided to develop this collaboration further and bring their individual practices into an active collision transecting and conversing one with another, where the determining means of production such as photography, installation, sculpture and film sit outside of their recognised modes of reception.

Eachus and Farhid extend the idea of fragmentation into a space where events, both real and fictional, intersect and can form new relations. Narratives appear and disappear, crisscross and become entrapped within the trajectory of other forms of assemblage. Their work presents an excess of visual and referential material that resists being subsumed under systems of categorisation.

The spectator/viewer is invited to enter the space of uncertainty, suspending the notion of transference. The meaning becomes the product of negotiations, the order of things transformed by the intervention of time and space, as well as the intertwined architectural forms and the extraneous music, to allow temporary cohabitation and point of collision. Gilles Deleuze's notion of 'delire' (Delirium) (To move out from familiar patterns) is relevant here, where the patterns and relations between things are disrupted to form a new conceptual potential even though they may be temporary.

Narration: Paul Eachus, Ross Mullan & Polly Eachus
Performance: Polly Eachus & James Battley
Special Thanks: Mahan Namin, 1000 GESTALTEN, Warped Perception & The Action Lab

Exhibiton:
2020 Solo Exhibition at Matt's Gallery 29th February 23rd March
2020 MattFlix, online projects at mattsgallery.org 6pm 3 April – 6pm 17 April

A Bullet in The Absence of Air Resistance

Which takes its references from established historical events, reconstructing them outside the continuity of their time and space. Violence is the main contour throughout the film, sitting alongside historically significant events and inconsequential, frivolous or even irrelevant incidents. The time is interrupted, the objects, events and the images appear to be out of their context, ruptured by the irrationality of the space. The past, present, and the future are in constant communications experiencing the momentary. Or perhaps, more appropriately, a set of durations taking place out of their context away from their location and time; and outside of their supporting and conforming mechanisms. These durations are experienced as implications, suggestions, conditions of possibility or condition of re-occurring, or in a more conceptual sense as potentials for an apocalypse.

Panta rhei

Which depicts a Heraclitan world of nature deteriorated as a result of ecological calamity; a trajectory along which bodies are located within the wreckage of dilapidated structures, witnessing a world in the process of being annihilated; where the points of sensitivity are slowed down, prolonged and crisscrossed; we have become the centre of being in the process, the mechanical devices, the pseudo-scientific experiments, the boiling frogs without realising. A visualisation that echoes a Borgesian spatialisation, establishing platforms of false coherence and stability that operate on conflictive structures of the oxymoron, where an excess of visual and referential material come together outside the continuity of time; or perhaps where different time systems are made in the same space; like a series of chance gatherings, randomly formed to the point where the mere chance operates on a very edge of physical and conceptual collapse.

Snakes and ladders’

Which references chance as well as means of ascent and descent, where bodies are forced to manoeuvre within the confines of a symbolic game; a game which reveals itself as the embodiment of a gigantic machine, a governing system of domination and state-controlled social practices.

The concern for control as an essential element of power is evident when one recognises that the bodies have to perpetually adjust themselves into a kind of repertoire, in principle, be repeatable, be recognized as ‘the same’ in each repetition, in other words, a need for iteration, without which, the bodies fail to articulate themselves except within this regulative order. But the socialised bodies transgress and the process of the normalization is disturbed by a perpetual intrusion of one order into another, where the ‘violence’ become the necessary condition that would channel obedience.