Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla

This exhibition presents a special focus on the video practice of Allora & Calzadilla, artists who have come to be known internationally through their diverse body of critically engaged work. The selection of new and recent videos presented in the gallery survey the artists’ broad range of interest in art-historical, philosophical, and ethico-political problems. From their home base of Puerto Rico to Post Katrina New Orleans to the Middle East, the artists have firmly planted their practice within the matrix of today’s complex global realties, the attendant questions of power related to these contentious sites, and the inevitable impacts that each local brings to the entire world order.

A Man Screaming is Not a Dancing Bear 2008, is a newly commissioned work for Prospect 1 Biennial in New Orleans. It takes place in Post Katrina New Orleans and focuses on two scenes: the interior of an abandoned house in the Ninth Ward and the wetlands of the lower Mississippi River Delta: out of which the city of New Orleans was carved. The film depicts a resident of the 9th Ward, Isaiah McCormick, “playing” a set of window blinds in the house. The percussive rhythms he creates on this homegrown instrument- a gesture that inevitably evokes the great musical experiments of the Mississippi- expose the home interior to the light outdoors, generating an inconstant flutter of light that reveals the sediments, marks and uneven traces that attest to the events of a recent history.

Deadline 2007, made on September 23rd in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the wake of catastrophic damage of Hurricane George, is an ecological witness-bearing through the medium of film. It consists of a single take shot of two palm trees. Suspended mid-air is a frond fallen from one of the trees caught by a fishing line, its silhouette against late afternoon sky giving it an uncanny corporeality: taken aloft by the wind, swaying back and forth, hovering between life and death.

There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Sheep 2007, is a video made for the 10th International Istanbul Biennial whose musical score is generated by a tulum. The tulum represents what may be the most ancient piping instrument in the world. Generally played in the small villages of the Kaçkar Mountains in the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, especially among the Hemsin and Laz people (but also attributed to the Greek culture that was once present in this region-known as the Pontos), this folk wind instrument, whose fundamental shape is derived from the carcass of a sheep, plays a key role in the transmission of local ancestral languages, cultures, oral traditions and music histories. Moreover, its musical variants, from the Great Pipes of the Highlands to the Roman versions have played an key role as instruments of war. Like so many other places in the world confronting the new realities of globalization, the Kaçkar region faces the difficult challenge of preserving its traditional heritage while finding ways to sustain and develop itself economically. This has led to a major decline in the population of the region as many people have left to work instead in the larger cities.This film depicts a Kaçkar tulum player using this musical instrument to fill up the tire of his bicycle as he travels throughout the city of Istanbul. As he inflates the punctured tube, he produces a series of shrill and penetrating notes that roar throughout this busy city, creating a sound-scape that resonates with the different speeds of modernity and development at the crossroads of Europe, Eurasia, and the Middle East.

In the video, Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands 2006, filmed in Loiza, Puerto Rico, a pig is roasted over an open fire in a lechonera - a special structure found throughout the Latin American world, especially in the Caribbean, for cooking pig. For their film the artists collaged the spit onto the back wheel of a stationary automobile. When the car accelerates the pig turns at different speeds, while the voice of Residente Calle 13, a young reggaeton singer from Puerto Rico, addresses the viewer in Spanish in a free form rap that the artists wrote in collaboration with him. He draws on the examples of non-human social organizations, such as those among bats, termites, and ants, for possible alternative modes of being-in-common and describes a potential path through contemporary experience. Part reality, part fiction, overheated, overpopulated, restricted and suffocated, the world he describes is an antagonistic state of order and disorder, heat and excess, civility and barbarity in an age of armed globalization.

Allora & Calzadilla