The Perimeter is pleased to present Ensemble, a group exhibition that brings together 11 artists exploring staging as a methodology for examining history through its incompleteness. Throughout this exhibition each artist takes part in a process of archival excavation, reimagining the ways in which we record and assign value to history - and in turn, determine what stories are told and remembered.
Ensemble unfolds in many acts. Borrowing its title from the etymological root insimul meaning “together, at the same time”, the term describes a group of performers who engage in the collective act of storytelling. By considering history as a composition, an image to be reconstructed and arranged, the theatre as metaphor opens up a speculative framework within the art historical canon. The stage becomes a site where both time and disbelief are momentarily suspended, a place to challenge dominant narrative structures and propose alternative futures.
Presenting newly commissioned and recent works, Ensemble draws on the motifs of drama to explore the study of historiography as a collective discipline. These motifs include staging as a device to construct narrative through choreography, oral history, performance, and collage.
Historiography & Archival Formats
Addressing the study of historiography, painters Bendt Eyckermans and Tristan Pigott consider the framing of gesture through an appropriation of the Western canon of art history, questioning the implications of an objective truth within an archive.
Through the use of spatial intervention and installation, artists Nikita Gale, JJ Guest, and Coumba Samba expose the order and unseen structures which condition lived environments today.
Costuming & Choreography
Drawing from iconographic and popular content, costuming functions as a tool to transform and orchestrate the body. Through an arrangement of both physical and digital imagery, Issy Wood indexes cultural vernacular within the genre of classical painting. Wood’s compositions consider the screen as a site of staging identity. Using ultracontemporary references including found images and clothing, she applies the language of still life to deconstruct how props and costuming assign meaning through their positioning.
Artists Adam Farah-Saad and Louise Giovanelli employ techniques of sampling, or sequencing, that implement choreography as both a visual and temporal practice. Compositions are overlaid, interrupted, and spatially flattened, often rendering images suspended. This use of repositioning inside the frame acts as a relational strategy that complicates traditional narrative structure.
Storytelling & Composition
Rene Matić utilises dance and photography as a mode of resistance to challenge notions of origin and empire. In thematic parallel, the allegorical paintings of Mohammed Sami shift the perspective around autobiographical work by engaging a subjective voice through a quietness underlaid within the composition. Landscapes are both embodied and dislocated, where cropped images and framing materialise through the absence of a figure.
Anthea Hamilton’s practice encompasses costuming, staging, and sculpture to blur the lines between public and private liminal space. In the absence of her collaborative performances, the audience is left with a site seemingly set to be re-activated. Fragments of Hamilton’s score remain as an installation, where the poetic entanglement of costumes, props, found objects, sound and the hybridity of language act as a container in response to the existing architecture of the building.
With special thanks to Alice Black, Arcadia Missa, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, Modern Art, Public Gallery, OOF Gallery, Thomas Dane and White Cube.
Curated by Sasha Ercole.
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