The Closer I Get to the End the More I Rewrite the Beginning

Curated by Suzy Halajian

with Basma Alsharif, Doa Aly, Gilda Davidian, Mariah Garnett, David Horvitz, Hiwa K, Mark Leckey, Klara Liden, Christine Rebet, Julie Tolentino, Erika Vogt, and Hanna Wildow
texts by Doa Aly, Janine Armin, Shoghig Halajian, and Litia Perta
& a video program organized with Clara López Menéndez

Opening Saturday, November 21, 7-10pm
November 21-December 13, 2015 (Gallery Hours: Tue-Sun, 12-6pm)
Video program and performance info below

Bodies are moving, swaying, spinning, coming together in ecstatic relief, only to come apart in Mark Leckey’s 1999 video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. The video mashes up found footage of British youth culture in various underground dance scenes from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s with a single soundtrack unifying the images. Serving as a starting point to the project, the work presents a timeless social experience that celebrates the party as a political tool in its diehard resistance to the capitalistic workweek, as well as transcendence found through the act of ‘getting lost’ in subcultural dance codes and ultimately, in fatigue.

The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning (1) presents works by Basma Alsharif, Doa Aly, Gilda Davidian, Mariah Garnett, David Horvitz, Hiwa K, Mark Leckey, Klara Liden, Christine Rebet, Julie Tolentino, Erika Vogt, and Hanna Wildow to explore the state of exhaustion, through the time and space that make it possible. The project questions the appearance and contours of social spaces that enable this condition, and locates instances within these sites that allow for new forms of sociability. By considering both individual and collective states of being together situated within a neoliberal and mutating model of capitalism, the exhibition asks how these spaces may be realized in a state of nonstop action and renewal and how their potentials may unfold over time. The works in this exhibition reimagine, re-perform, consume, and even obliterate images and places set in motion. They refuse to remain static or meet at the center, but continue to turn and shift, only to begin again.

The exhibition brings together artists’ works, a video program, and writings that respond to spaces found within relentless states of operation. It takes into account more recent political insurgencies and sites of dissent; refusal and/or withdrawal from work, action, and participation; a lack of physical tenacity due to the durational; and the effects of these on cultural and historical imagination that define both the personal subject and public event. Further expanding out from the exhaustion of space due to withdrawal and protest, the project stresses the position of indefinable bodies in the social sphere, as well as an all-consuming understanding of institutional frameworks in a move away from the authorial. It does not advance the notion that once an option disappears its potential is lost; but rather it is in the act of clearing out, the voiding of, that allows for new possibilities to come into fruition or to be made visible. Once emptied, fields of echo, repetition, and perpetual reflection can prove useful.

1. Part 1 of this project, The Recorder Was Left On, Or The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning, was on view at LACA (www.lacaarchive.org) from August 7 to September 26, 2015. Both exhibitions partially borrow their titles from Alejandro Cesarco’s installation, The Streets Were Dark With Something More Than Night Or The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning (2011).

Video program 

Part 1. Screening & Discussion at 1009 N. Madison Ave. LA, 90029 

Saturday, November 14, 2-9pm

Screening of Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871), 2000, 345 min.

Sunday, November 15, 5:30-9pm

Screening of Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk’s Out on the Street, 2015, 71 min, followed by a discussion on both films.

Note: The screenings above are scheduled before the exhibition opens at Human Resources.

Part 2. Screening at Human Resources

Friday, December 11, 7-9pm: Screening featuring works by Malin Arnell, Phil Collins, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Basim Magdy followed by a Q&A with Malin Arnell, Harry Dodge, and Stanya Kahn.

Thanks to the support provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

Image: Klara Liden, Bodies of Society, 2006, DVD, color, sound, 5:08 min, courtesy the artist, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York and Galerie Neu, Berlin.