Each year, from mid-summer to early fall, the arts converge in Scotland’s capital city.  The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are well-known venues for the performing arts.  The Edinburgh Festivals have expanded to include art forms such as film, jazz and blues, storytelling, and books.  The visual arts is no exception in having its own festival platform.  Taking place throughout August and the first week of September, the Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art.  Daily Serving brings our readers some of its highlights.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ’stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

This week, From the DS Archives has chosen to reintroduce Catherine Wagley’s interview with artist Drew Heitzler.  Heitzler’s film installations are worth revisiting for the way they explore history and narrative through manipulated found footage as well as his own new work in film.  Notably inspired by the precedent of history paintings like The Oath of the Horatii, Heitzler presents us with filmic narratives of the past that provide new meaning in the present.

Drew Heiztler, "for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers." Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

Drew Heitzler rephrases history in ways that seem both furtive and strangely revealing. In his most recent work, he culls characters, settings, and plots from the visual history of the still-young Los Angeles. Rearranging and re-imagining three films from the early 1960s, all of them productions in which the rebel spirit of Easy Rider seems to be slowly eating into the stylized melodrama of noir, and also gathering an expansive archive of still images from Hollywood of yesteryear, he’s created a narrative that confuses the past in order, paradoxically, to clarify the hidden truths about desire and culture that lurk beneath it.

Heitzler, who participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, recently exhibited at LAX Art and Angstrom Gallery among, other venues. for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers, his current exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery, closes January 30th.

CW: Your current exhibition makes me think of remixes and mash-ups—art forms that are about rearranging someone else’s cultural product and telling a different story. What prompted you to re-edit historical film and images?

DH: Subway Sessions and TSOYW are two previous films I made and actually shot. The first on super-8, the second on 16mm (TSOYW was a collaboration with Amy Granat and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial). In both cases I relied heavily on the tropes of specific film genres. Subway Sessions used the aesthetics of 70’s surf films to tell the story of a certain time and place, specifically, Rockaway Beach New York just prior to September 11, 2001. TSOYW looked like a 70’s biker film and relied heavily on the tropes of that genre. So it wasn’t a big step to go from using the look of earlier film genres to actually using earlier films themselves. Also, I had read a book on documentary film making by Erik Barnouw that my wife Flora found for me in a thrift store. In the book, the Soviet cine-clubs were discussed. It seems that after the revolution it was impossible for Russian film makers to get film stock due to western boycotts. What they had in abundance were western news reel and even films that were being smuggled into Russia in effort to undermine the Revolution. The cine-clubs would re-edit these films and news reels in order to create new narratives that supported their cause. I liked this idea of re-ordering an existing cultural image to better fit your own perception of the world. It’s collage.

CW: How important is story-telling to you?

DH: Story telling is what I am interested in. I love those French paintings like The Oath of the Horatii or The Raft of the Medusa. They operate like movies. They tell stories which can exist at different allegorical levels.

CW: Each of the three films that make up for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled ) were originally presented on their own, right? Why combine them?

DH: The combining of the films came out of a problem of exhibition. This show was originally scheduled to open at MOCA in May, 2009. Then it was postponed to September of that year and then postponed again to January of 2010 before it was eventually canceled all together. The result was that I had a long time to think about how these three films would be presented. I had always intended for them to come together as a trilogy, but as I kept messing around with ideas of how they would actually be presented in the gallery, they morphed into a triptych, becoming a whole new piece. What I discovered and enjoyed was that once the three individual narratives were doubled and superimposed over one another, they operated in a much more complex way. The individual narratives were still visible, but complicated by their interaction with one another. In other words, the lines of thought were confused, which seems to me much closer to the way we go through life. At least that seems to hold for me.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: The other day, you used the words “sticky stuff,” referring to the way the oil industry lurks underneath L.A. culture. I love those words and they’re definitely relevant to your work. How do you relate the historical, anthropological side of your project to its sticky, psychological underbelly?

DH: I think it has something to do with the problem of truth, or more accurately its impossibility. I came to Los Angeles with an idea of what I would find when I got here. It was the idea that had been presented to me, sold to me in a way. What I found was something completely different. History and anthropology work the same way. They present themselves as framing a truth while they are only presenting a perception (I was assistant to Fred Wilson for several years and I learned from him how important this idea is). However, the idea of truth is absolutely vital to our ability to exist as a society, this is common sense. Likewise, sublimation is absolutely necessary for the ego to exist within a society. There are rules to follow. Once again, the only way this sublimation works is to accept certain ideas, certain perceptions as true. But just like the oil that bubbles up into the sunny Los Angeles landscape, the sticky stuff that we sublimate, keep subterranean, or relegate to the subconscious can’t be kept at bay. It always bubbles up.

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This Sunday’s From the DS Archives unearths a feature on artist Kathy Grayson that presents a compelling example of contemporary painting.  While Grayson’s work is realized in paint, her process capitalizes on the technologies of globalization.  She appropriates You Tube footage and then uses computer programs to capture and abstract the transference of data, which facilitates digital broadcasting.  Grayson’s Bangalore series visualizes an otherwise invisible everyday process.

The translation of information from an original event to a digital screen takes many forms. While the process of transferring data from the camera to satellite to analogue broadcast to a digital screen device occurs countless times each day, we usually absorb this information with little to no awareness of the process. Fueled by this topic, painter Kathy Grayson is currently presenting a new body of work titled Bangalore on view at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist has taken televised sports footage of professional tennis matches for the subject of her new paintings. Utilizing YouTube footage of the matches, the artist examines the abstraction that occurs from the digital compression of data. Grayson runs footage through computer applications to distort and abstract the images, reconfiguring the digital remains to create what she calls a “stirring up of the video data to make interesting ruptures in figurative painting.”

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Olivier Debroise and Rafael Ortega.  A Story of Deception, Patagonia, 2006 still from 16mm film (4:20). Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich © Francis Alÿs.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work.   The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon.  The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape.  The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations.  The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically.  Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera.  In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992.  These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets.  The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets.  Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case.  The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting.  Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising.  They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages.  In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland.  When Faith Moves Mountains:  A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality.  In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru.  Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement.  This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine.  Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division.  Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California.  The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants.  Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010).  This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making.  It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still.   Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning.  Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs:  A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September.  The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary).  The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.

This week’s edition of From the DS Archives reintroduces a feature on artist Pablo Zuleta Zahr written by Allison Gibson.  Zahr’s ‘patterned panoramas’ offer an innovative study of contemporary mobility – finding beauty in the shared urgency of the urban commute.  Zahr’s observance of the everyday suggests that we should pause to appreciate the moment as we navigate our busy lives.

The subway in any major city is a conduit, where thousands of lives flow like water through pipes in the journey from past to future. The subway station, however, is like a purgatory—a present-tense place where the journey temporarily hangs in the balance as one waits on the platform, maybe reading a book or reading the looks on the faces of passersby. Some people are hardened by years of public transportation; they pay no mind to who or what is happening around them. Others can’t help but assume the posture of human curiosity in such spaces and find fascinating the fleeting masses of strangers. Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, belongs to a third category altogether. He surpasses the instinct to merely “people watch” and goes beyond to create elaborately curated photo documentaries of people moving through a particular station. The footage that he captures is true—real people passing through a real subway station—but the art that he makes from the video footage turns into a sociological exercise wherein people are organized by gender, style, and color of clothing and then regrouped into “patterned panoramas,” as the gallery refers to them.

For his first show in the United States, entitled Event Horizon at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, Zuleta Zahr presents work from his series’ Baquadano and Madrid, as well as the four panel video installation, BUTTERFLYJACKPOT. Baquadano consists of large format photographic grids comprised of stills from ten hours of video footage of Chilean metro passengers. The results of the artist’s meticulous reorganization of people are almost abstract; the visuals of color and pattern become as strange and alluring as the orchestrated grouping of originally disconnected individuals.

Pablo Zuleta Zahr lives and works in Berlin and holds an MFA from Düsseldorf Art Academy. His work has been exhibited widely outside of the U.S., including at MITTAGEISEN, Berlin, Germany; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Studio la Città, Verona, Italy; Gallery Bendana-Pinel, Paris, France; and Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK, among elsewhere.

This Sunday, From the DS Archives presents Come Hither Noise.  We have chosen to reintroduce this previously published article for the way it gives singular attention to sound – an often overlooked element of contemporary visual art practice.  Come Hither Noise reminds us that sound can also stand alone as a compelling medium of exploration that is appropriately situated in the gallery space.

Come Hither Noise at Fremantle Art Centre in Perth, Australia is an exhibition of sound-based works, which aims to highlight connections between aural, spatial and visual perception. Curator Jasmin Stephens argues that media and even sensory distinctions are growing increasingly arbitrary in contemporary art. In this exhibition she presents a selection of works which are both noisy and resolutely visual, designed to heighten the audience’s experience of both senses. Come Hither Noise features visual artists working alongside composers, producing aural environments which encroach on the musical, but this is not easy listening.

Composer Thomas Meadowcroft’s Monaro Eden references two icons of Australian culture: the Holden Monaro, an engine-heavy muscle car that subjugated the roadways from 1969 to 1982, and twentieth century artist Rosalie Gascoigne, specifically her 1989 work Monaro. Meadowcroft’s installation alludes to Gascoigne’s process of assemblage by sampling the revving engine of a Monaro and layering it with Sine tones, producing a humming aural landscape which the audience can navigate, when seated, by pressing foot pedals which alter the volume of the tones. The artist likens this process to “a Sunday drive” there is no great logic to it: some key musical destinations are dictated by the arrangement of the engine sounds but otherwise listeners are free to hear their own ways through the installation.

Richard Crow’s Imaginary Hospital Radio plays upon the ostensibly therapeutic role of the hospital radio station by injecting bloodless muzak with a form of medical waste the incidental soundscape of the body subjected to surgical technology. The accompanying image is from the archives of the Moorfields Eye Hospital where Crow was treated as a child. Imaginary Hospital Radio was broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late on Saturday 29 August.

The exhibition also includes Mark Brown (Aus), John Conomos (Aus), Ross Manning (Aus), (Aus/GER), Elvis Richardson (Aus), Sam Smith (Aus), Sriwhana Spong (NZ).

Come Hither Noise is presented as part of the 9th Totally Huge New Music Festival in association with Tura New Music, 10-20 September 2009.

Artist Rachel Khedoori explores encounters with space and their psychological implications.  According to the Venice Biennale’s Making Worlds catalog, Khedoori’s art practice ‘invites viewers to see hidden or forgotten spaces’ – spaces that are ‘generated by the limits of memory’.  In Cave Model, presented at that show, Khedoori referenced Plato’s Cave Myth and cited it as a source of inspiration.  Yet her art practice deviates from this allegory by not seeking to escape ‘the cave’ and thereby gain philosophical clarity.  Instead, Khedoori directs us towards the untenable shadows that more often define the human condition.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Khedoori experiments with ambiguous spaces through a diverse practice that includes installation, sculpture and film.  The artist’s current solo exhibition of new and recent work at Hauser & Wirth in London is remarkable for the artist’s foray into documentation.  The Iraq Book Project, an ongoing documentary piece, was first shown at The Box in Los Angeles in 2009.  It is comprised of online news articles dating to the start of the Iraq War – 18 March 2003.  Sourced from around the world, the articles are retrieved using the search terms ‘Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’.  They are then translated into English, compiled and presented in a series of large books arranged chronologically.  The articles are printed in a uniform, seamless manner and each is demarcated by title, date and source.  These large books are arranged in the main gallery space at Hauser & Wirth on tables along with stools for gallery visitors to interact with the work.  Khedoori’s Iraq Book Project is an on-going effort that is updated continuously.  Its conclusion will depend upon the length of the war.

Khedoori is certainly not alone in responding to the Iraq War, but has typically eschewed such content in her work. While The Iraq Book Project is somewhat of a departure, it can also be viewed as a repositioning of Khedoori’s engagement with space.  In this work, Khedoori locates information within the digital realm and extracts it.  This process allows viewers to explore the changing face of and attitudes towards the war.  It also stores information as a part of our collective memory that would otherwise be dispersed and largely be forgotten.  Khedoori preserves war coverage and places it within the physical world.  She chooses book form, which is a lasting and traditional mode of recording and passing on knowledge.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

A film installation and a photographic series are found upstairs in the American Room of the gallery.  Film is an important medium for the artist, who has returned to it throughout her career.  The photographic series is set in a natural Australian landscape at 5.00 am, while the film is set 12 hours later at 5.00 pm.  For the film installation, Khedoori returns to the device of the mirror to manipulate the moving image.  The film is projected onto a screen that meets a mirror at a 90 degree angle – causing the looped footage to appear to continually separate from itself as it plays.  The Hauser & Wirth gallery points out that the affect is much like a Rorschach ink blot test.  Yet, in this instance it is set in landscape and in motion.  This work allows the gallery visitor to encounter ambiguous, psychologically-tinged space.

Rachel Khedoori’s work has shown internationally since the mid-1990s.  In 2001, the artist’s high-profile solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland brought her work increased international attention.  Subsequently, Khedoori has taken part in several noteworthy group exhibitions.  In 2008, the artist was included in the traveling exhibition Visual Tactics or how pictures emerge, which opened at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Seigen, Germany.  Khedoori’s work received a lot of attention in 2009 when she took part in the Venice Biennale’s Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition and Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Rachel Khedoori is the identical twin sister of fellow artist Toba Khedoori.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA and is represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner in New York.  Khedoori received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.

Untitled, 2010 (Film, 3:33 minutes). Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010.© Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Rachel Khedoori concludes at Hauser & Wirth in London on 31 July.  It marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK’s capital city.