Art & Language, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham, Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky, Jonathan Monk, Sean Snyder, Akram Zaatari
Lisson Gallery launches a new initiative: Lisson Presents, a monthly series of
curated displays of both new and established gallery artists.
Opening on the first Wednesday of every month, each instalment of Lisson
Presents will include three complementary elements: a focused presentation of
an artist not currently represented by the gallery; a new body of work by a
gallery artist; and a curated display of works by Lisson artists.
Read moreSince its foundation, Lisson Gallery’s reputation has had two defining
characteristics: its support for art with a conceptual foundation, and its
championing of successive generations of British and international artists. Lisson
Presents will explore different aspects of this dual ethos, constrained neither by
fashion or history instead drawing on the dynamic interplay between tradition
and invention.
Lisson Presents I
4 – 21 February 2009
Akram Zaatari (born 1966) lives in Beirut. In his work, he researches and
represents visual and textual documents relating to individuals, objects, film
footage and photography from the recent history of Lebanon. The artist
challenges the self-evident immediacy of these documents and explores a
personal fascination for the devices and apparatus of filmic projection in time.
Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, part of his recent work is based on
collecting, studying, and archiving the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el
Madani (born 1928) as a register of social relationships and photographic
practices. On 27 March, Zaatari will open his first major solo exhibition at the
Munich Kunstverein, running until 10 May 2009.
Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky will present Black and White, 2008, a new
video that uses a short fragment of footage from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
(1966). The video is a portrait of Liv Ullmann playing Elisabeth Vogler. The
footage is played forward and then backwards, generating a continuous loop in
which the portrait fades into darkness only to re-emerge from it, while the
progression of the music suddenly reverts. The insistence of the actress’s gaze
confounds expectation, with no action or narrative ensuing. The emphasis is on
the materiality of the image and its physical qualities, while the manipulation of
the footage induces a sense of defamiliarisation and triggers one’s attention to
look at things the way they are perceived and not the way they are known.
Lisson Presents 1 will also display selected works by Art & Language, Ceal
Floyer, Rodney Graham, Jonathan Monk and Sean Snyder, all in various
ways exploring the physicality of meanings conveyed in the work of art.
Press enquiries Catherine Mason at Calum Sutton PR
catherine@suttonpr.com +44 (0)20 7183 3577
