Prelude – The Brooklyn Rail

On view

The Parc Des Ateliers, LUMA Arles
June 26, 2021 – Ongoing
Arles, France

LUMA Arles rises above the vast fields and vineyards of Provence, which are fed by the Rhône. It is crowned by a faceted Frank Gehry tower, the polished steel walls of which slope downward, reflecting the gold and yellow tones of the dried fields and the scorching sun. PreludeAs the name suggests, LUMA is one of the opening exhibitions of the longstanding project of the collector Maja Hoffmann in Arles. A secondary meaning of the word, Warm up, is appropriate as the works on display find access to a growing sense that something disastrous is about to happen, that things are heating up, and that this is just the beginning of our collective confusion.

The tower as an entrance to the Parc des Ateliers, houses, studios, libraries, exhibition rooms and permanent installations like a variation by Carsten Höllers Isometric slides which regularly elicits cheers from the visitors and accompanies the noise of the central hall. Looking up, part of the wall on the third floor is cut away to reveal a mirrored spiral staircase, a fleeting and whimsical glimpse of a piece by MC Escher in real life that happens to be the work of Olafur Eliasson. take your time. Walking up the stairs and through the cavernous interior of the Steel Summit got confusing until I realized that the work I was seeing was behind the tower in a series of post-industrial rooms that were once used as the workshops of the National Society of French Railways ( SNCF) and repair shops next to the tracks that run south from Arles to the Mediterranean ports.

Prelude, a group exhibition of works by Sophia Al Maria, Kapwani Kiwanga, P. Staff and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, is located in La Mécanique Général, a large rectangular building near the center of the park. The buildings frame newly landscaped gardens designed by Bas Smets that are full of native Camargue plants that rise on hillsides separated by serpentine paths, like the eroded limestone of Les Alpilles with its accompanying rivers east of the Rhône from the Alps splash to the sea.

Kapwani Kiwangas “Flowers for Africa” (2021) welcomes visitors with a huge frond gate made of dried eucalyptus. After the smell has long since subsided, the fragile, flattened leaves frame a row of dried bouquets of flowers on white plinths. Some lay flat, others in vases – Static, Globe Amaranth, Yarrow, Heliconia, etc. – all completely parched by this point, translucent in their death. flower for Africa, an ongoing series of site-specific installations, captures images of “moments of historic importance” from across Africa and reproduces the bouquets of flowers that accompanied the signing of treaties, independence, accords and peace. The bouquets are made in collaboration with local florists, using available flowers to interpret the source material. Flowers as an accompaniment to solemn moments have a long tradition as a framework for our successes, but as an ephemeral bloom they are not forever. Kiwanga’s poetic act, framing these flower collections as signs of past moments of political success and allowing them to wither and dry out, suggests the volatility of social contracts, their promises and their ultimate doom.

You meet P. Staff’s through a greenish covered hallway and into a side room of the main hall Conjunctions (2021). A flexible LED screen hangs like a quilt, framed by hand-blown uranium-glass bodies that are installed on the floor; too narrow for bowls, too wide for vases, there are any kind of vessels, transparent vessels that glow in a faint, creepy green in the black light spots. The LED screen flickers to pink and a hypertext rush begins: YOU TWO PLANETS YOU CONNECT YOU TOUCH YOURSELF A GIFT … (not a quote, but a summary). A poem P. Staff wrote during the pandemic flashes word for word in bold, sans serif capital letters on the screen as mono and bi-tone colors change in tone and shade around the word. An abstract soundscape plays from above. The poem works through isolation, feelings of desolation, connectedness, the Finally Connection, of the other as a gift, of the self as a gift. The visual ferocity of the images is visceral – for a moment I could feel the heat as the LEDs all glowed red. My mind and body were confused and perhaps angry at the blinking, dazzling screen, trying even harder to focus on each word as they were soldered by paint and making connections, connections between them to piece together a temporary sense of recognition . The transpoetics of Staff creates a tenderness in this visual trauma, the hard-won message conveys the gift of the other.

Back in the main room I enter Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s contribution, Borderlands (2021), an installation and VR work exploring the liminality of this region, a vast brackish river delta south of Arles known as the Camargue. There are red, green, and white concrete mats around the VR headset locations. The mats are colored with the red and green algae endemic to the Camargue. The white is, of course, salt; The Camargue has long been a place of salt production. Here, shallow, square pools called “salin” were carved into the rocks to collect the brine from the Mediterranean and then dehydrate it. Steensen went to the salt marshes during a residency at LUMA in 2020 and took high-resolution images of this unique ecosystem, an estuary that is a temporary home to over 400 species of migratory birds, including flamingos. The virtual reality part of the work leads the viewer into the salt flats, moving from the hewn salt down until the crystallized towers of salty brine reach over the viewer and I am enveloped. Time and space are distorted when the viewer’s scale is manipulated in virtual reality. Immersed in the brine and accompanied by algae-like seals floating around the viewer, time slows down as the water surrounds. The rocks below pulsate and wobble, accumulate, grow, live. The geological growth that takes place in these border areas occurs on timelines that are normally beyond our understanding. However, it is as if we are present and part of the coral accretion as it converts dissolved calcium into calcium carbonate stone. Salt is an entry point into geological time with its ability to dissolve and recrystallize to an extent that is perceptible to us. Perhaps it enriches our tastes, but it can also improve our perception of time and bring us closer to the depths that require thinking and planning on the greatest time scales.

Sophia Al Marias Tender Point ruin (2021), commissioned by LUMA for this exhibition, is a filmic meditation on art and being. It’s the feeling of being on the verge of falling into this place from somewhere else. The video essay interweaves fragments of post-colonial understandings, poems, provocations, skits and a tattoo session. The video work opens with an inverted close-up of the sun, flares and everything, and moves effortlessly through planetary scales, a rolling moon and a rocky beach where the protagonist collects ceramic shards and a strange piece of plastic with French and English script that prompt Al Maria to ask: “Is that from the past or the future?” to which the answer comes: “The present”. One refrain in the video comes from the question of what art is. Hafez ‘answer: “Art is the conversation between lovers … True art lets the divine silence break out in the soul in applause.” Another replies: “Art is two stones rubbing against each other and the rubble left behind, that is what remains , with which you don’t know what to do with. ”Towards the end, in which Victoria Sin makes a cameo while applying her face, the artist has a petroglyph of the sun tattooed on her. The shot lingers over a table with an upside-down stamp on it: “The end is near”.

So what is art at this moment, this prelude to catastrophe? Turmoil will create more borderlines, more cracks, more conjunctural moments. The remnants of these frictions will be many, but I hope some of us stay to allow what is left behind to please the inner silence.