Crone Music

Type

Format

Date 18 Jan/31 Mar 2019

Crone Music presented two new, interconnected films by British artist Beatrice Gibson, alongside an expanded events programme in Gallery 3 featuring the artists, poets, musicians and wider community with whom the films have been made.

With Basma Alsharif, Adam Christensen, CAConrad, Laurence Crane, Maria Palacios Cruz, Diocouda Diaoune, Nick Gordon, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Ben Rivers and Ana Vaz.

Crone Music presented two new, interconnected films by British artist Beatrice Gibson, alongside an expanded events programme in Gallery 3 featuring the artists, poets, musicians and wider community with whom the films have been made. Borrowing its title from American composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1990 album of the same name, the exhibition seeks out an explicitly feminist lineage through which to recast the syncretic, collective and participatory nature of Gibson’s practice.

Devised by Gibson in collaboration with friend and architect Dominic Cullinan, Gallery 3 has been designed to reflect the artist’s production ethos. Just as Gibson called upon friends and extended communities to help make her films, Camden Art Centre borrowed furniture and other items requested by the film’s participants from a network of local partners and individuals. Gallery 3 will also host an expanded programme of readings, screenings, performances, talks, workshops, meetings and residencies led by the films’ collaborators. Rooted in feminist and queer discourse, these will include a Radical Reading Sit-In with Eileen Myles; one-to-one Personalized (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals with CAConrad; and a week of experimental music composition and concerts with Laurence Crane, drawing on the work of Pauline Oliveros. Also presented is a screening programme curated by Gibson of moving image works by filmmakers and friends from whom the artist has drawn inspiration, including Chantal Akerman, Basma Alsharif, Barbara Hammer, Laida Lertxundi, Chick Strand, Public Access Poetry and Ana Vaz.

Working at the intersection of art, feminism, expanded cinema, experimental literature and film, Crone Music explores friendship, feeling, empathy and solidarity as tools for individual and collective agency in an ever more unsettled world.

Films The Artist Artist Film Images Events

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead was filmed in part with CAConrad and Eileen Myles, two of the USA’s most significant living poets, on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in January 2017. Weaving together CAConrad and Myles’ words with those of other poets, footage shot through the following year in America and Europe, and intimate moments with her family, the film is a deeply personal work in which Gibson seeks out the power of ritual, casting the poet as a prophet navigating an alternative path in times of perilous authority.

Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs

Made as a companion piece, the second film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters) is based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

The Artist

Beatrice Gibson (b.1978) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her films are often improvised in nature, exploring the pull between chaos and control in the process of their own making. Drawing on figures from experimental modernist composition and literature – such as Cornelius Cardew, Robert Ashley and William Gaddis – Gibson’s films are often participatory, incorporating cocreative and collaborative processes and ideas. Gibson is twice winner of The Tiger Award for best short film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and winner of the 2015 Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel. In 2013 she was nominated for both the Jarman Award for Artists Film and The Max Mara Whitechapel Prize for Women artists. Gibson’s films are distributed by LUX, London and Argos, Brussels. She is represented by Laura Bartlett Gallery.

This film was produced by Jared Schiller for Camden Art Centre on the occasion of Beatrice Gibson's exhibition Crone Music (18 January 2019 - 31 March 2019).

Installation view of Beatrice Gibson: Crone Music, Camden Art Centre, 2019. Photo: Luke Walker

Installation view of Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg: A World of Glass at Camden Art Centre, 2011. Photo: Andy Keate

Beatrice Gibson, I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead, 2018 (still)

Beatrice Gibson and Erika Balsom Introductory Talk

Thursday 17 January 2019
5.45 – 6.30 pm

Beatrice Gibson discusses her new exhibition and work with film scholar and critic Erika Balsom.
Free, but booking is essential.

Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London. Her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and a frequent contributor to magazines such as Artforum, frieze, and Sight and Sound. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals including Cinema Journal, Screen, and Grey Room, and she has contributed to exhibition catalogues for artists including Sarah Sze, Candice Breitz, and Rachel Rose. In 2017, she was the international curator in residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Zealand, resulting in the 2018 screening programme and publication An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. In 2018, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Exhibition Preview Beatrice Gibson, 2019. Photo: Mark Blower

Gallery Tours

Wednesdays & Saturdays, 12.00 & 4.00pm

Drop in for free, short gallery tours led by our Volunteer Front of House assistants.
The tours begin in the Central Space.

Educators Social

Wednesday 30 January
6.00 – 7.00pm

An evening for educators to visit the new exhibition Crone Music, take part in an informal tour of the show with the education team, and meet other education professionals over a glass of wine.

The team will launch the new Educators’ Resource. This guide provides activities and conversation points for students of all ages and is designed to support educators in structuring a visit to the centre and in planning related lessons.

This event is suited to teachers and anyone working in arts and education.

Experimental Music Workshops, Laurence Crane with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

5 – 9 February 2019

Over the duration of a week, the composer Laurence Crane led experimental music workshops with students from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, rehearsing scores by composers whose music has influenced Beatrice Gibson’s work and share affinities with the two films.

Composers included John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Mary Jane Leach, Amber Priestley, John Lely, Christian Wolff and Pauline Oliveros. Gallery visitors were welcome to observe rehearsals and on Wednesday 6 February, the cellist Anton Lukoszevieve participated in the workshop.
An informal performance took place in the gallery at the end of each day.

Part of a programme of events hosted by composer, Laurence Crane.

Performance by Anton Lukoszevieze and in-conversation

Wednesday 6 February, 7.00pm

Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze gives a short solo performance, which will include Raimondas Rumsas, a work for solo cello by Laurence Crane, composed for Lukoszevieze in 2002. The piece is played with a curved bow, which can sustain all four strings of the instrument simultaneously. Lukoszevieze has been performing Crane’s work for over 20 years – often with his own ensemble, Apartment House – and has also worked with Beatrice Gibson, most notably on her film Crippled Symmetry. Following the performance, Gibson and Crane will discuss collaborative processes in Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs.

John Lely: The Harmonics of Real Strings
Alvin Lucier: On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Darya Zvezdina: n
Laurence Crane: Raimondas Rumsas

Part of a programme of events hosted by composer, Laurence Crane.

Laurence Crane is closely associated with the ensemble Apartment House, who have given over 40 performances of his works. Compositions written for Apartment House include John White in Berlin, which is featured on the soundtrack of Beatrice Gibson’s new film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead. In the past five years there have been four CDs released of his music; by Apartment House, and by the ensembles Cikada and Asamisimasa, both from Norway, and by the Ives Ensemble, from the Netherlands. His piece Octet, composed for Plus-Minus Ensemble, was shortlisted for the 2009 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, in the Chamber-Scale Composition category, and in 2017 he was a recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. He is currently a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The Music of Laurence Crane and Pauline Oliveros

Saturday 9 February, 8.00pm

Music by Laurence Crane and Pauline Oliveros is featured on the soundtracks of the two new films by Beatrice Gibson. This concert presents pieces by both composers; some sharing similar aesthetic and structural characteristics with Gibson’s output and also with the work of Gertrude Stein, on whose screenplay Gibson bases Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs.

Exploring aspects of portraiture, repetition and duplication – exact and inexact – the music seems in many ways closely aligned to the notion of ‘the copy’ that fascinates Gibson.

Pauline Oliveros: Trio for flute, piano and page turner
Laurence Crane: Piano Piece no.23 ‘Ethiopian Distance Runners’
Pauline Oliveros: Portrait of Manuel Zurria
Laurence Crane: Gli Anni Prog

Manuel Zurria (flutes and electronics)
Mark Knoop (piano)

Manuel Zurria worked with Oliveros on his realisation of ‘Portrait’, which he subsequently released on CD; Mark Knoop and Zurria have both been involved with the performance of Crane’s music for several years now.

Part of a programme of events hosted by composer, Laurence Crane.