The Lisson Gallery / The Big Board, or... 'And before it falls, it is only reasonable to enjoy life a little' / lecture-performance by Rana Hamadeh (DAI, 2009) as part of the exhibition 'The Magic of the State' with Ryan Gander, Goldin + Senneby, Lili Reynaud Dewar a.o.
The Lisson Gallery,
Rana Hamadeh
Thursday 25 April 2013 | 6:30 pm
The Big Board, or... 'And before it falls, it is only reasonable to enjoy life a little' (2013) is a newly-commissioned lecture-performance by Rana Hamadeh, and part of her ongoing umbrella project Alien Encounters, which she initiated in 2011. Inspired by Sun Ra's 1974 film Space is the Place, Oskar Schlemmer's 1926 Diagram for Gesture Dance and Paulus Fürst's 1656 engraving of Doctor Schnabel of Rome, the performance is an exhaustive deliberation on the notion and gesture of 'falling'. Thinking through the conjunction of the legal and the spatial, the work evokes a set of provocative associations, playing out an intensive scrutiny of the shared lexicons of criminology, epidemiology and theatre.
"The Magic of the State" is an exhibition and editorial project curated by Silvia Sgualdini of Lisson Gallery, in conjunction with Beirut – a new art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo – the project defines an ambitious platform for artistic exchange between two contrasting art institutions operating in very different contexts. Each exhibition features a different constellation of works by the same artists, including new commissions, and a public program of performances, talks and screenings.
"The Magic of the State" borrows its title from the eponymous book by anthropologist Michael Taussig. In this text, combining fiction with analysis, Taussig conceives the modern State as configured through a theatre of spirit possession into the living body of society. Historically placed at the intersection of science, religion and politics, the concept of magic exists in an integral relationship to that of power. Magic in its broadest sense is addressed within the context of the project: both secular magic and its connection to propaganda and mysticism with its claim to access supernatural entities and powers. Magic's coerciveness lies in its power to transform, simultaneously holding together the desire to believe and the desire to doubt. Here, politics and magic, statecraft and stagecraft, converge as performance.
The exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London, can be seen until 4 May 2013
Rana Hamadeh's lecture performance will take place in London on April 25.
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