Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime is a group exhibition operating on a level of truthfulness that dips in and out of questionability without ever ringing conventionally false.
Liam Gillick’s video piece Vicinato 2 (made in collaboration with Douglas Gordan, Carsten Holler, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija) opens with a nighttime shot of a brightly lit city and a robotic narrator who states: “The camera pulls back from the city. The scene is being set. It could be daytime or nighttime. There will be four characters who think they are friends.” The scripted nature of the conversations of the four “friends,” the emotionless affect of the narrator, the references to the work’s own inevitable narrative (another voice-over: “This scene is only important to link what you saw before with what will happen next”) add up to an admission of artifice that might drown the work in self-consciousness. Instead, it opens up a profound space for questioning and demonstrates a curious emotional depth.
Scripted in a different way is Ajay Kurian’s “Studio Visit #1: Auder and Kurian,” an interview between artist Michel Auder and Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime’s curator that intimates a false veneer the moment you pick up the earphones to listen to the supposed audio of the transcript. The first rift in the façade is that the voices in the audio are female. Holes in the conversation, then, can be heard – such as a “the” that goes unsaid but documented in the transcript, or a pause in a response doesn’t seem to logically follow the flow of the conversation. The listener, then, is pitched into uncertainty – Is it truth? Is it fiction?
And what about the text on the wall, claiming to be a note from Kurian regarding his thoughts about the exhibition? Does it relay an event that actually happened?
Bruno Latour, as quoted in Kurian’s essay for the exhibition, declares, “Truth is nothing but a chain of translation without resemblance from one actor to the next.” Which Witch plays with an investigation of truth through distortion; many of the works – particularly Maria Petschnig, Michel Auder and Leigh Ledare’s – present us with ostensible “truths” from the artists’ lives, fragments of their realities. Though they document real life, they nevertheless are not real life – instead creating a parallel universe that mirrors but do not reflect.
The truth, this show seems to say, exists in innumerable possibilities – from the works themselves, the lives referenced in the work, and our sense of the work as we navigate the context of exhibition. Darren Bader’s “Friends” is a collection of standard black combs affixed to the gallery walls, placed in unexpected locations that highlight the process of searching in-between – the truth lies not in the destination of the found comb, but in the act of looking for it. Our engagement with the piece, and not the significance of the locations themselves, is what activates it.
In the end we are left not with an ultimatum or a realization, but with an open invitation for conversation. Kurian’s essay attempts to guide us through this “this strange and unlit space”, and proffers: “Perhaps the life of a show is based primarily on what is left out, what remains to be said by others, allowing the organism to have not one center but many nodes of interaction, joining and separating without end or answer.”
Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime is on view at White Flag Projects until December 18. For more information on our current exhibition and other upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.