• 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy –Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
  • 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy –Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
  • 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy –Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
  • 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy –Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva

4 Waters – Deep Implicancy

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva

29 September
03 November 2018

Curated by: Denise Ryner

4 Waters – Deep Implicancy

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Curated by: Denise Ryner

After breaking through the glassy, formal fixed walls of the Understanding, released from the grip of certainty, the imagination may wonder about reassembling the fundamental components of everything to refigure the World as a complex whole without order.

  • Denise Ferreira da Silva

 

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s film works, Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2018), are experiments in entanglement and ways of “The Thinking of The World.”

 

Neuman and Ferreira da Silva’s artistic collaboration builds on their combined research and Ferreira da Silva’s planetary view of the world as a plenum, a complex terrain in which humans and geological, bacterial, and meteorological environments, although at times seemingly differentiated, are never really independent forms and phenomena. For Ferreira da Silva instead, the human and non-human are elements of each other. Nor does she exclude time from the entanglement of space and beings: what is considered ‘past’ and ‘history’ are merely different stages and transformations of the present.

 

Ferreira da Silva and Neuman both engage and challenge the time-based medium of film to investigate such transformations, shifting between scale, surface and perspective, and land and landscape. The artists edit and compile a combination of overhead and macroscopic imagery to unsettle rather than clarify, category, and organize their visuals. This image-based unsettling is further emphasized by a bass-driven soundtrack, which Neuman has paid particular attention to throughout his filmmaking practice: it vibrates through multiple sound channels and envelopes the separation between viewers and the found, archived, animated, and filmed images.

 

This flow – between sound, space, image, and viewer – echoes Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s interest in the form and ubiquity of water in 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy. Here, water is a model for undermining the seminal influence of Plato and his metaphysis, which separates the world in terms of fixed, ideal abstractions and an illusory sensorial materialism.

 

Serpent Rain similarly undoes our bodies and time by blurring the biological and physical borders of our existence. The film considers the implications of this lack of separation in terms of the entanglements of capital and the economy that keep the so-called geological, biological, and historical past circulating as commodity and value.

 

This exhibition is the first in a series presenting art practices centred on the production and expansion of research narratives.

 

Serpent Rain was commissioned by Stefano Harney for The Bergen Assembly.

 

4 Waters- Deep Implicancy was produced with the support of the Arts Council England, Hannah Barry Gallery and the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) and the Critical + Creative Social Justice Studies Research Excellence Cluster.

 

Thank you to Ellen O’Connor for her assistance with the wall text for this exhibition.

 

1. Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability, 2016

 

A VIFF MODES Community Partner event

 

The Or Gallery acknowledges its presence on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.

Exhibition Text & Map (108.61 KB)