24 Hour Museum - official guide to UK museums, galleries, exhibitions and heritage
Gateway to Over 3,000 UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions
Skip to navigation
Exhibitions
Idris Khan At InIVA And The Victoria Miro Gallery London
By Caroline Lewis
06/09/2006
Rising Series... After Eadweard Muybridge 'Human and Animal Locomotion', 2005. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
Idris Khan takes seminal works of art, music, literature and photography itself to create new works of experimental photography in his first UK solo exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery.
Alongside the exhibition, running until September 30 2006, Khan’s film, A Memory… After Bach’s Cello Suites, will be shown at inIVA (the Institution of International Visual Arts). The installation will be screened between September 12 and October 22.
Khan’s chiefly black and white images have been created by re-photographing and digitally layering a series of pictures of works by authors ranging from Freud to Beethoven. The result is an enigmatic play on themes of appropriation and re-creation, with more characteristics in common with drawing or painting than photography.
In his own words, Khan describes the condensed photographs as “a playful emblem of our own departure from the corpse of photography, burdened with what the Futurist Anton Guilio Bragaglia once referred to as its ‘glacial reproduction of reality’.”
Sigmund Freud's 'The Uncanny', 2006. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
The work entitled Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ takes pages from one of the psychoanalyst’s key texts and turns it into an enlarged, multi-layered essay, challenging the viewer to digest all the words in one glance.
“It’s kind of a fantasy and a nightmare rolled into one – the wish fulfilment of apprehending a whole book in an instant, but the fear and anxiety of never being able to understand what the book wants to tell us,” says Khan.
The blur of text appears to be superimposed upon two images – da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne. The iconic artist’s vulture fantasy was the subject of some of Freud’s interpretations.
Sheets of music from Beethoven’s piano sonatas are similarly merged into a single composite image in the work Struggling to Hear… After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas. Musical notes coalesce in dense smudges of abstract movement, charting their own rhythm across the page in an attempt to be heard.
Image: black and white image resembling a blurred sheaf of wheat
Blossfeldt... After Karl Blossfeldt 'Art Forms in Nature', 2005. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
The work offers a visual replication of the composer’s personal frustration with the deterioration of his hearing. Khan suggests that the memory of music, its idea, shape and image, became more essential to Beethoven than its sound.
The layering treatment is given to Bach’s cello suites in Bach… Six Suites for the Solo Cello. The accompanying film, A Memory… After Bach’s Cello Suites, at inIVA, is haunting, incorporating the sounds of cellist Gabriella Swallow playing the suites and digitally tiered imagery.
Pioneering 19th century photographer and Bauhaus tutor Karl Blossfeldt captured segments of some 6,000 plants on film in his book Art Forms in Nature. Khan’s ghostly Blossfeldt… After Karl Blossfeldt ‘Art Forms in Nature’ looks at the meticulous documentation of nature’s patterns in the early photographic work, reorganising it into an even more detailed assemblage in a single print.
Image: black and white image of several sheets of musical manuscript imposed on one another
Bach... Six Suites for the Solo Cello, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
Rising Series… After Eadweard Muybridge ‘Human and Animal Locomotion’ returns to early scientific experimentations with photography. The series of prints borrows images from Muybridge’s sequential motion studies of human and animal forms.
Khan’s reinterpretation, however, takes a less scientific stance and imparts a pictorial aesthetic to the choreographed movements of the human subjects. His images of humans seemingly suspended, apparition-like, evoke the Victorian fascination with spiritualism and the metaphysical possibilities of photography.
The film installation at inIVA is part of the Atlas II season, which includes a hair sculpture performance by Meschac Gaba (October 15) and Por-trait by Franklyn Rogers (October). Find out more at www.iniva.org.
Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW, is a commercial gallery – visit their website at www.victoria-miro.com for more information.
inIVA
Institute of International Visual Arts , 6-8 Standard Place, Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3BE, England
Open: 9.30 - 17.30, Mon - Fri
Related Articles
INIVA Commissions Philomena Francis To Make Art From Treacle At Rivington Place
inIVA and Autograph ABP Bring Rivington Place To Life
E-news registration
E-mail story to a friend
Tell us what you think
Wildlife Photographer of the Year At Natural History Museum
Future 50 - Top Online Axis Artists In Leeds Exhibition
Yoko Ono Takes Her Love To Tyneside For BALTIC Show
Shetland Museum Unveils Evocative First World War Collection
Sisley In England And Wales At London's National Gallery
Darwin And His Big Idea At The Natural History Museum London
Babylon: Myth Or Reality? At The British Museum
The Hub's Guitars, Made In Britain, Played All Over The World
Interactive Map Explores Coastal Communities At Jaywick, Essex
The Post Office During WWI At The Cabinet War Rooms
St. Barbe Museum Hosts The Women's Land Army - A Portrait
Oliver Clegg's Night's Move At The Freud Museum London
New Walk Museum Hosts Ernest Gimson & The Arts And Craft Movement
Paths To Fame: Turner Watercolours From The Courtauld
National Portrait Gallery - Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life
Disposable People - Slavery Exposed At Southbank Centre
Soho Of The 1950s And 1960s At Photographers' Gallery
Eileen Agar: An Eye For Collage At Pallant House Gallery
Search this site
Home Page
News Page
Exhibition Page
What's On
Trails Page
Website of the Week
Letters Page
Welsh Home
Graphical Version
Copyright © 24 Hour Museum
Information published here was believed to be correct at the time it was prepared. Welsh language pages developed with CYMAL: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales, funded by the Welsh Assembly Government.