THROUGH TIME & TODAY

2008 (winter) (--cure011.1)

through time & today in collaboration with Helena Sidiropoulos, 

an artist book published by NosadellaDue, + live reading by Douglas Park, 

+ an installation at NossadellaDue and neoncampobase, Bologna

Nico Dockx, Helena Sidiropoulos (with Douglas Park) 

Nico Dockx presenta a neon>campobase una triplice versione del video through time & today – la versione definitiva di un video già esposto, quella scartata precedentemente, l’ulteriore versione che ne svela il processo di ripresa originale – in cui si delineano tre differenti ma ugualmente possibili approcci alla narrazione, suggerendo attraverso il semplice scorrere del tempo l’impossibilità di una codificazione definitiva. All'esterno dello spazio espositivo sarà posizionato un lightbox. Through Time & Today si arricchisce dell’esperienza dei due mesi di permanenza a Bologna presso Nosadella.due e si trasforma in un libro d’artista, redatto in collaborazione con Helena Sidiropoulos, scrittrice e artista belga, che illustra una lettura duplice e divergente degli stessi materiali documentari, appartenenti ad un tempo comune ma ad una percezione ed interpretazione necessariamente differenti. Il reading di Douglas Park durante l’inaugurazione fornirà una lettura vocale, e, quindi, un’ulteriore interpretazione di questi stessi documenti. Complementare alla presentazione del libro, una raccolta di immagini, selezionate e ordinate dello stesso archivio dai due artisti secondo due differenti approcci, sarà proiettata nell’ambiente privato di Nosadella.due che, durante la mostra, diviene spazio pubblicamente condiviso. All’esterno dell’edificio uno scarabocchio infantile, rinvenuto anch’esso nel medesimo archivio, diventa un’insegna luminosa, pagina scritta sulla e verso la città. 

artist book

(STICKINESS, for Francisco J. Varela, Chile 1946 - France 2001)
(c) Nico Dockx & Helena Sidiropoulos
published by NosadellaDue
ed.: 1000
+ improvised, live reading by Douglas Park (25/01/2008 23h)
10euros 
www.teknemedia.net/.../27973.html

Nico Dockx and Andreas Golinski

NOSADELLA.DUE
Via Nosadella 2
January 25–February 23, 2008

Nico Dockx and Helena Sidiropoulos, Stickiness, 2008, artists' book in an edition of 1,000, dimensions variable. From “Blackout.”

The archive: a collection of varying fragments waiting to be exhumed, reanimated, and assigned a story to tell. “Why speak in terms of ‘archive’?” asks art historian Jorinde Seijdel in Nico Dockx’s collaborative artists' book, Stickiness, 2008. “It implies . . . a generating of consciousness that deals with ‘production’ in a different way—that manages to slow it down,” Seijdel continues, her text printed in white letters on a black folio. “It is not a question of quantity or completeness. It is more that materials lead you to speak.” A white folio with black letters interrupts Seijdel’s text, interjecting the words of Dockx’s collaborator, Helena Sidiropoulos: “In between all this there are they. Their place is one of many places. They move in autonomous ways.”

Part of the ongoing project through time & today, 1998–, Dockx and Sidiropoulos’s book was published by the project space Nosadella.due and is a central feature of the current exhibition, “Blackout.” The show comprises new works created by Dockx and Andreas Golinski during their two-month residencies at the Bologna venue. The alternating black and white pages of Stickiness foretell the play of light and dark, and the interweaving of the remembered and the forgotten, that recur throughout the exhibition. Dockx’s bedroom from the residency looks lived in: Sheets and blankets still cover the bed. Two slide projectors, atop a tall wardrobe and a low dresser, beam images in quick flashes, followed by long pauses. Vertical blinds, children drawing, a street with shingled houses, a reading light turned to face the wall: The images seem disparate, yet when considered with the artists' book, read aloud by actor Douglas Park at the show’s opening, their “autonomous ways” begin to follow the palpable, though evanescent, logic that rules our lives.

Golinski’s room is closed and locked. If one peers through the cracks around the door, however, a black crib is visible, bathed in a warm yellow light. In the otherwise-dark exhibition space, the same delicate yellow light reappears behind a wooden wall the artist uses to disorient the visitor. Throughout the installation, Golinski makes subtle though decisive changes to the position and wattage of the bulbs he uses. In another part of the installation, a blinding white light emanates from a bulb hung low, as if directly above the head of a child. Golinski’s installation addresses what is left behind by collective memory. He does not retell the lost stories, but alludes to them in the subtle, though powerful, sensations evoked by his installations. Inspired by the historical novelist Adriano Prosperi’s recent book Dare l'anima: Storia di un infanticidio (To Give the Soul: Story of an Infanticide, 2005), about a young girl hanged in 1710 for killing her newborn baby, Golinski’s project is founded on documents from Bologna’s municipal archives that reference the incident. In contrast, Dockx’s book and slide projections are based on a personal archive of photographs, videos, recordings, notes, tickets, and correspondence that the artist is constantly developing. Both works question what we decide to keep, abandon, and reuse in establishing individual and collective narratives.

A contemporaneous exhibition at Bologna’s Neon>Campobase includes another component of through time & today: Two videos play on monitors positioned in corners near the gallery’s high ceiling. Each is a unique edit of the same original footage, depicting Dockx molding spiderwebs into a ball. While Golinski restores humanity to the monumental, Dockx renders monumental the seemingly insignificant.

—Emily Verla Bovino

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