Dying in Spite of the Miraculous

Co-curated exhi­bi­tion at Gertrude Con­tem­po­rary as part of the 2010 Mel­bourne Inter­na­tional Arts Festival.

Fea­tur­ing work by six major inter­na­tional artists, Jeremy Blake, Ulla von Bran­den­burg, Bas Jan Ader, Joachim Koester, Mel O’Callaghan and Saskia Olde Wol­bers, Dying in Spite of the Mirac­u­lous reveals the shad­owy out­lines that bleed between worlds, where the artist becomes insep­a­ra­ble from their haunt­ing of a site or a story.

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all images by Chris­t­ian Capurro

Co-curated by the Mel­bourne Fes­ti­val and Gertrude Con­tem­po­rary the exhi­bi­tion explores film’s poten­tial as an alle­gory for the inter­play between real time and the illu­sory as actors blur their char­ac­ters with them­selves, and sites res­onate with accu­mu­lated history.

Com­bin­ing the intrigue of real life events and myths born from trauma and psy­chosis with rit­ual and magic, this exhi­bi­tion presents a rest­less fusion of the celes­tial and the real. Bas Jan Ader and Jeremy Blake both dis­ap­peared pre­sumed drowned at sea while explor­ing sad­ness and psy­chosis in their work. The myths and super­sti­tions sur­round­ing occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley and killers Jean-Claude Romand and Charles Man­son are the sub­ject of works by Joachim Koester and Saskia Olde Wol­bers. Joachim Koester and Ulla von Bran­den­burg reveal a curi­ous col­lec­tion of archi­tec­tures, from the ghoul­ishly muraled rooms of Crowley’s mag­i­cal com­mu­nity in Sicily, to Le Corbusier’s failed utopian exper­i­ment Villa Savoye, and Jeremy Blake’s video work sum­mons the spec­tres of the Win­ches­ter Mys­tery Man­sion built by Sarah

Lock­wood Pardee, as a gift to the ghosts that haunted her. In all of these works the celes­tial coex­ists with the out-take and the cer­tain becomes ethereal.

Work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with archi­tect Johan Van Schaik Gertrude Contemporary’s two gallery spaces will be trans­formed into a dema­te­ri­al­is­ing labyrinth, mir­ror­ing the way the works blur the dis­tinc­tion between self and sub­ject, and cre­at­ing an entire view­ing envi­ron­ment for each of these works.

Artists:

Jeremy Blake (USA) pre­sented work in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 Whit­ney Bien­ni­als, and his solo exhi­bi­tions included Cor­co­ran Gallery of Art, Wash­ing­ton, San Fran­cisco Museum of Mod­ern Art, Museo Nacional Cen­tro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and Schu­sev Museum of Archi­tec­ture, Moscow. His work also fea­tures as the abstract sequences in the film Punch Drunk Love.

Ulla von Bran­den­burg (Ger­many) has exhib­ited widely includ­ing the 2009 Venice Bien­nale, the 2008 Torino Tri­en­nale, Yoko­hama Tri­en­nale and Bien­nale Jerusalem, Wat­tis Insti­tute for Con­tem­po­rary Art, San Fran­cisco and Tate Mod­ern, London.

Bas Jan Ader (Nether­lands) exhib­ited at Museum of Mod­ern Art, New York, ‘Prospect ’71’ Düs­sel­dorf, and his solo exhi­bi­tions included Stedelijk Museum, Ams­ter­dam, ARC Musée d‘Art Mod­erne de la Ville de Paris, Cam­den Arts Cen­tre, L

ondon, and Kun­sthalle Basel.

Joachim Koester (Den­mark), a con­cep­tual artist and a grad­u­ate of the Royal Dan­ish Acad­emy of Art, was a 2008 final­ist for the Hugo Boss Prize, exhibit­ing in West and East Europe, North and South Amer­ica, and Africa, includ­ing the 2005 Venice Bien­nale Dan­ish Pavilion.

Saskia Olde Wol­bers (Nether­lands) was the win­ner of the Beck’s Futures award in 2004 and the Bâloise Prize at Basel Art

Fair 2003, exhi­bi­tions include 2009 Athens Bien­nale, Hir­sh­horn Museum and Sculp­ture Gar­den, Wash­ing­ton, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Art Gallery of York Uni­ver­sity, Toronto, Musée d’Art Con­tem­po­rain de Mon­tréal, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Mel O’Callaghan is an Aus­tralian born, Paris and Berlin based artist whose film, video, pho­to­graphic and sculp­tural instal­la­tions have been exhib­ited in Syd­ney at Annan­dale Gal­leries, Gitte Weise Gallery, Sher­man Gal­leries, Gallery 4A, Asia-Australia Art Cen­tre, and Uni­ver­sity of Art Gallery of New South Wales, as well as Queens­land Art Museum, Galerie

Schleicher+Lange, Paris, Cité Inter­na­tionale des Arts, Paris and Irma Vep Lab, Cham­pagne, France.

Cura­tors: Emily Cor­mack, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Simon Maid­ment and Brett Sheehy.