Falke Pisano. THE BODY IN CRISIS

The Showroom presents a new exhibition by Dutch artist Falke Pisano. Sculpture, video, print, drawing and installation work are brought together in the latest iteration of Pisano’s The Body in Crisis series (2011- ), an ongoing investigation into the human body at historical moments of crisis. It will be the most significant presentation of her work in the UK to date.

Pisano’s research centres on six historical moments: Pergamon 199; Amsterdam 1571; Paris 1793; Mons 1915; Paris 1974; Houston 1984. Each marks a change on body experience (be these institutional, administrative or physical); from the Roman theory of the four ‘humors’, to the shift from feudalism to industrialisation, to the experience of shellshock in the First World War, to the privatisation of prison labour. Histories of housing, medicine, architecture, gender, art, economic and social environments intersect within Pisano’s research.

The backbone of the exhibition is the work Structure For Repetition (not Representation)(2011- ): a large-scale wooden and fabric structure, which is both a sculpture in its own right and also provides a display architecture for images and text. Two video works explore “bodies in conditions of hunger, poverty, war and exclusion”. Archival visual material and texts illustrate structures that have been used to present and represent the body at different historical moments.

Pisano states 'The Body in Crisis has two main components: a performative process of organisation (concreteness, abstraction, form, method, space, time, narration etc); and the more immediate expressions that this conceptual structure facilitates. These expressions originate in a sense of urgency to speak about real conditions of violence and how art might relate to them.'

'The Body in Crisis extends The Showroom’s consistent profiling of discursive artistic practices' says Showroom Director Emily Pethick, 'with a new focus on body politics, explored through a very striking, distinct, and at times highly abstract, visual language.'

The artist will give a talk on the occasion of the exhibition opening on 30 April. A limited edition print made for the exhibition, My Body is Coming Back to Me(2013), will be on sale at The Showroom.

Falke Pisano
THE BODY IN CRISIS