Laying the Table, Setting the Stage
A essay by Eve Kalyva of Breakfast Show
What changes when we view art first thing in the morning? Setting this question as the starting point of inquiry, Breakfast Show (2-26 June 2016, PuntWG, Amsterdam, curated by Erica van Loon) engages with different modes of experience and the time and space that one’s body occupies. It particularly explores ideas about awareness, intimacy and interpersonal communication.
The role of the curator has become increasingly theorised in recent years. It is often compared to that of an orchestrator or mediator, and the curatorial practice as adhering to the principles of montage and as having a didactic potential (Lind 2012, Martinon 2013). This means that apart from its contents, the how an exhibition is organised is important in the mediation as well as in the shaping of the visitor’s experience. Indeed, the structure of the exhibition itself can have performative and reflective elements that form an additional layer of engagement with art and can help raise and maintain more general questions.
Breakfast Show is a good example of this. A well-conceived and executed exhibition, the works on show are carefully combined in terms of form and content and presented in an immersive yet thought-provoking way that further draws to the surface questions about staging. Specifically, Breakfast Show incites the visitor to reflect on how one’s experience is staged and, perhaps more importantly, generates questions regarding one’s expectations of what an art show is and should be doing.
When I arrived at 5:20am, the sky was just turning pink. Everything was very quiet. The first thing I noticed upon entering was that the gallery room was dark and silent. I was curious to see what kind of works would constitute such thing as a “breakfast” show running from sunrise until 10:00. But they weren’t photo stills of landscapes or sound installations of morning activities. The only explicitly morning act was my getting to the gallery when I did.
As curiosity was waking up my half-asleep mind, my eyes got accustomed to the dim light of the room. It was a bare setting apart from a very performatic, fully laid breakfast table at the one side of the room and a blue and red glow coming from the opposite wall. The first piece was already on. I sat on the floor cushions and picked up the headset.
Rosie Heinrich’s It’s possibly the only way that I can walk through myself (2014) skilfully interweaves image and sound in order to open up different imageries and temporalities. Photographs of personal artefacts, interior scenes and clouds reflecting on glass windows succeed one another, fade out and emerge on the screen. They are accompanied by a voice-over and prompt subtitles, yet what one sees and what one hears follow their own rhythm, intensity and register. For example, the image of a bird drawing on the wall next to a bed with a railed headboard lingers on the screen while the accelerating voice of a man talks about rage.
Two narrating voices are set in dialogue with this flow of images. They are also edited in such a way that they seem to be in dialogue with one another. What is more, the viewer is not excluded from this act. The first-person accounts that were given to the artist are not simply offered up to the viewer.