p- ool- s o-f t- he ou- t- l- ine- s

Anna Barham

p-  ool-   s  o-f   t-  he  ou- t-  l- ine-  s

Viewable from: Wednesday 13 May - Friday 30 July, 2021

In line with current restrictions there will be no launch for this project, which is externally viewable (onsite) as well as online. Details to follow for an event in June/July to launch the accompanying publication. 

In response to the ongoing restrictions faced by galleries to present visual arts in safe circumstances we are focusing our attention outwards from the gallery with a series of commissions for the window at Chelsea Space. The first is from Anna Barham, comprising text and objects that flow across the internal and external aspects of Chelsea Space's architecture. 

The installation incorporates a score titled Knives (2017), collaboratively produced by Barham through computer and human reading processes, which contains over a hundred versions of a short passage from a text by the Brazilian Czech-born philosopher, writer and journalist Vilém Flusser titled Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. In the text Flusser presents a speculative investigation of the vampire squid to consider human and non-human life; in the passage Barham has extracted, Flusser uses the knife as a metaphor to describe how human reason cuts through the world. 

At Chelsea Space, the score is presented as posters, pasted onto the glass from the inside, trapping objects between the text and the glass which — together with vinyl images applied on the outside of the window — distort, annotate and punctuate the words. 

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Anna Barham is an artist working between text, live events, video and installation.  Her work considers the transformation of sense as language is translated between different material forms, technologies and bodies. She questions how authorship is distributed and what subjectivities are formed through these processes. 

Recent projects include To be we to be, Index, Stockholm and Quote-Unquote, Bucharest; Liquid Crystal Display, Site Gallery, Sheffield and MIMA, Middlesbrough; A sentence can be ours and ours, Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven, BE; This is a voice, Wellcome Collection, London and MAAS, Sydney; Secret Surface, K-W, Berlin. She has published two books Poisonous Oysters(2019) and Return To Leptis Magna (2010).

For more on Anna Barham, please go to: www.annabarham.net/

www.chelseaspace.org 
www.arts.ac.uk/chelseaspace