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'Conducting Bodies' by Rebecca Ackroyd and Maya Deren at Exo Exo, Paris

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A house, a garden, are not places: they spin, they come and go. Their apparitions open another space in space, another time in time. (...) A garden is not a place. Down a path of reddish sand, we enter a drop of water, drink green clarities from its center, we climb the spiral of hours to the tip of the day, descent to the last burning of its ember. Mumbling river, the garden flows through the night.

A tale of two gardens, Octavio Paz

Conducting Bodies establishes a dialogue between the work of Rebecca Ackroyd and Maya Deren to explore the shifting temporal interrelations of bodies and landscapes and reflect on body ecologies and inter-subjectivity beyond the human.

For her first exhibition in Paris, London-based artist Rebecca Ackroyd (b. 1987, UK) presents a new large-scale installation and a series of drawings. Ackroyd repurposes floral bedsheets and a walk-in polytunnel, a structure typically used for controlled gardening, creating an immersive environment suspended between daydreaming and reality. Visual echoes of domestic life, 60s counterculture, and imagined nature infuse the present with a feeling from another time, opening for reflections on social identity and processes of growth.

Maya Deren’s experimental film At Land (1944) features Deren herself (b. 1917, UA - d. 1961, USA) as a woman washed up on a beach. Deren cuts from the seashore to a dinner party, through foliage and interiors, and back on the beach. The camera follows Deren’s movements, almost merging with her body, while her image is caught in a web of fragmented events, all connected by the search for a chess pawn. Taking on an environmental psychology approach, the film externalises the hidden dynamics of individual formation, focusing on social rituals and the human body’s place in nature.

The artists share an interest in everyday symbolism and imagination and evoke through non-linear narratives the interlacing between different life-forms and environments. Conducting Bodies proposes an imaginative ‘wood wide web’ perspective, to rethink the physicality of socio-ecological networks; a journey through time, oniric sensitivity and fragmented selves that may conduce to hidden paths or lost ones to rediscover.

5.7.19 — 23.7.19

Curated by Giulia Civardi

Film courtesy of Maya Deren and LUX, London

Supported by Fluxus Art Projects

Exo Exo

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

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