PERFORMED PLACES with MARIAM GHANI
and composers Qasim Naqiv and Aaron Taylor Kuffner.
For more information on screening the videos and prints contact Ryan Lee Gallery.
Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen Kelly have been collaborating since 2006. Their work synthesizes Ghani’s interest in architecture, literature, and history with Kelly’s ongoing exploration of the politics of movement and the transformative nature of performance, allowing parallels within the videos to seamlessly unfold. Drawing on ideas from the discipline of landscape archaeology, Ghani and Kelly often focus on the relationship between natural and constructed environments, or the history of a site and its current condition or use, while also contemplating the phenomenology of place as experienced through and reproduced by the performing body. Each project is centered on a single location or set of locations linked by a common history, context, or theme. Referred to by the artists as “performed places,” their videos are meditations on landscape, the human condition, and the passing of time. - Text by Amy Mackie.
When Spirits Move Them, They Moved
When The Spirts Moved Them, They Moved 2018 (3-channel 4K/HD video, ambisonic sound installation, RT 21:21) On Mother Ann’s birthday the whole Society met at the Meeting House to celebrate the day. Like all Sabbaths in Shaker villages, a beautiful stillness pervaded. After the body of worshipers gathered into order, we commenced the services by one bow and opened the meeting by singing a hymn. All that were able united into ranks to step for the first song, then formed two circles for the march. At this time in a meeting it was usual to step quick and lively for two songs, sing two songs for the slow march, then two for the round dance with the circle unbroken. On this occasion the house was too crowded to march with convenience, so the dancing commenced in a promiscuous manner by the middle and young classes, and was attended with great power. The seats had to be taken out of the room to give place for the spirits to sing and dance, and the gifts and blessings of heaven were poured forth by the heavenly Orders in great abundance. We received gifts of freedom and simplicity, life and zeal, balls of love and blessing, sparks of holy fire, palms of victory, staves of strength, crowns of love, mantles and robes of wisdom, chains of union, and numerous other gifts of a similar kind, calculated to strengthen our souls and fill us with life, which continued to flow almost incessantly throughout the meeting. Sometimes when an individual would receive a bush or other emblem filled with quickening power or holy fire, we would all unite and shake heartily. A great many were wrought upon by an irresistible power, which caused the assembly to shake and reel and toss like the trees of the forest when shaken with the wind. The involuntary exercise became so violent that we discontinued ranks and all united in the dance, and one was moved upon by the departed spirit of a female of some other Nation, and all her movements and motions seemed to prove she had lived to a very old age. There was some quiet sleepy kind of spirit took possession of Illinois Green, which caused her to sit about on the floor apparently asleep for some time, then all of a sudden she sprang to her feet and whirled and jumped about the room as tho she was affrightened into a fit. About the middle of the meeting, Emma McCormack was possessed by a spirit and lay helpless for some time, continually hollowing, then suddenly sprang to her feet and danced round the room very swiftly for a short spell. After this Emma broke out in the most melodious strains that the human mind could conceive of, singing songs new to us, that appeared to be from the Spiritual world. Much praise was danced and sung that day, and towards the conclusion we received from Holy Mother Wisdom, each one a drop of her pure love ... Some of those that were there say it was one of the liveliest meetings they were ever in.
Intro text adapted from:
A Brief account of the proceedings of the day, and the meeting of the Society at Pleasant Hill, Ky.
December 25th, 1845. / Western Reserve Historical Society VIII A-49
June, 1847 / Spiritual journal, Pleasant Hill archives
Monday, March 8, 1852 / Spiritual journal, Pleasant Hill archives
Saturday, February 14, 1857 and March 1, Sabbath 1857 / Filson Historical Society, Bohon Shaker Collection, Volume 11 of 40, “Journal Kept by James Levi Balance, April 1, 1854-March 31, 1860”
THE LORD'S DAY, MAY 25TH / JUNE 1st [1873] / “A Journey to Kentucky in the Year 1873,” Elder Henry C. Blinn
To Live, (1-channel HD video with stereo sound, RT 40:57 2012) was produced through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island residency. A small island at the mouth of New York City’s harbor, it served as a military installation from the 1770s to the 1960s. Like many of their videos, it is informed equally by literary and historical sources. In this case, To Live adapts and transposes Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal (published in 1960 by the poet H.D. or Hilda Doolittle) from its original setting in WWI London to the community of military wives and WACs on Governors Island during WWII. Using the disintegrating interiors of the island’s houses to reflect the cracks in the protagonists’ psyches, the narrative is about the extremes and estrangements produced by war.
Smile, you’re in Sharjah (1-channel HD video, with stereo sound, RT: 24:32, 2009) references the city’s own brand of welcome sign in the middle of a roundabout notorious for its rush-hour traffic jams. Populated with construction cranes, flocks of birds, and workers who assume the role of dancers, the video presents subtly choreographed segments in which everyday behavior becomes something monumental. Ghani and Kelly, who are noticeably absent from this video, also highlight the relationship between the sleek façades of the cityscape with the flow of migrant workers who are simultaneously the most omnipresent and invisible of the metropolis’ inhabitants. The video mimics the cyclical structure of the city—day to night, weekday to weekend, construction to demolition, labor to leisure—while the electronic score by Aaron Taylor Kuffner (constructed entirely from ambient sound recorded during filming) draws attention to its natural rhythms.
Fugitive Refrains, Single-channel HD video, with surround sound,RT: 26:11, 2007). Schloss Solitude and the Solitude Rotwildpark forest in Stuttgart, Germany are the sites and subjects of Fugitive Refrains. Schloss Solitude was built as a hunting lodge and summer residence in 1769 by Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg and exemplifies the late Rococo aesthetic, which used Three Surrenders Three Surrenders, (1-channel DV video with stereo sound, RT: 6:16, 2007) was shot in a gutted McDonald’s in midtown Manhattan. In the video, this raw environment is transformed into a poetic, eerie site for contemplation. A single dancer (Kelly) surrenders to this shifting atmosphere through a process of struggle, repetition, and reflection, while other performers moving rhythmically around her reinforce the demolition and renovation permeating the urban space. The soundtrack layers whispers and sung vocals (performed by Ghani) in several languages, associated directly or elusively with the idea of surrender. The vocals include a fragment of an aria from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Paride ed Elena. l’oeil and mirrors to create false perspectives and depths. Since 1990 it has housed the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where Ghani was an artist in residence during the summer of 2006. Kelly joined Ghani towards the end of this residency through which they created Fugitive Refrains, shot in six sites in the historic castle and forest (designed at the same time Schloss Solitude was built). The title of the video is inspired by two lines from William Wordsworth’s poem, Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, written a few decades after the Schloss was constructed: "That nature yet remembers/What was so fugitive!"
The City & The City 2015 (1-channel HD video with stereo sound, RT 28:50, 2015) is a video with a narrative told through voice-over and staged onscreen by choreographed performers, in a series of dreamlike or fragmented scenes set throughout St. Louis. The video was inspired by China Miéville’s 2009 sci-fi noir novel The City & The City, and maps the conceptual framework of that novel onto the cityscape of St. Louis, melding some of the fictions of the novel’s world with elements drawn from past and present histories of the city. Like the novel, The City & The City departs from the premise of two cities that are geographically intertwined, but economically and politically so divided that they become separate countries. But because the resulting city-states are physically cross-hatched together, the separation is maintained on a day-to-day basis by the citizens, who learn from birth to ‘unsee’ everything and everyone that belongs to the other city – quickly identifying all that is Other and looking away from it so reflexively that it vanishes from view. Violations of both the physical border, and the protocol of unseeing, are policed by a special and rather spooky force called Breach. A number of radical sects exist – some desire to unify the divided cities, while others believe that a third city exists in the dissensi, the liminal spaces claimed by both or neither cities, and still others believe that Breach might inhabit that uncanny Nowhere, located between Here and There. The video is narrated by Derek Laney; performed by Erin Ellen Kelly, Shirin Rastin, Jin Soo Park, Chaim Duffe-Holmes, and Naomi Merrihue; motion effects by Mores McWreath; score by Qasim Naqvi performed by the NYU Contemporary Music Ensamble, and sound engineering by Aaron Roche.
Like Water From a Stone (1-channel HD video with stereo sound, RT 20:09, 2014) was shot in Rogaland County, Norway during a residency at the Rogaland Kunstsenter in the summer of 2013. They collaborated with several artists and performers who reside in Stavanger for this project. Throughout the course of their research and in the process of location scouting, the artists contemplated what life in Norway was like prior to the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the late 1960s. The title, a play on the English idiom ‘like blood from a stone’, refers to the difficulty of extracting oil from the undersea deposits on the continental shelf as well as the endless struggle of existence on a cold, rocky landscape. It was filmed in places that expose evidence of the German occupation of Norway and draws from some of the imagery of the Romantic Nationalist painters. The video is includes a new choral score by composer Qasim Naqvi inspired by ambient sound recorded during filming and performed by two choirs and three soloists. Like Water From A Stone premiered at the Rogaland Kunstenter for the show, It Could Go Either Way: Mariam Ghani + Erin Ellen Kelly.
Landscape Studies: New Mexico, (1-channel HD video with quadrophonic sound, RT: 22:17, 2010) was filmed in and around the Galisteo Valley of New Mexico, and reflects the region’s history of strange encounters by means of an oblique pilgrim's progress. It is organized by Pueblo Indian theories of the meanings of colors, clouds, and directions. Each direction (north, west, south, east, above, and below) is associated with a particular color. Landscape Studies also brings to mind the exploration, conquest, revolts, rodeos, missile tests, film shoots, truck stops, and participant ethnography that have taken place in this area. One of many locations in the video is White Sands National Park, parts of which have served as missile test sites since the 1940s (including the location for the Trinity test), as well as being the backdrop for a number of films (such as Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth).
(a.k.a. Strangers in a Stranger Land),
Three Surrenders, (1-channel DV video with stereo sound, RT: 6:16, 2007) was shot in a gutted McDonald’s in midtown Manhattan. In the video, this raw environment is transformed into a poetic, eerie site for contemplation. A single dancer (Kelly) surrenders to this shifting atmosphere through a process of struggle, repetition, and reflection, while other performers moving rhythmically around her reinforce the demolition and renovation permeating the urban space. The soundtrack layers whispers and sung vocals (performed by Ghani) in several languages, associated directly or elusively with the idea of surrender. The vocals include a fragment of an aria from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Paride ed Elena.