Performing the text
Lynn Lu, Matthew MacKisack with Jeffrey Gordon Baker
Lynn Lu, Groundless, 2008

A performance evening to accompany the exhibition murmur.

Lynn Lu’s work gestures towards the connection between the public and private realms of experience and knowledge, empathy and intimacy. Experiments in social and relational exchange, her performances underscore bodily languages relayed between herself and her audiences.

Lu’s piece for murmur picks up on the imagery and metaphorical connotations of the act of spinning. Recalling ‘spinner’ tales such as that of Rumpelstiltskin and the Miller’s Daughter who spun gold out of straw, or the myth of Arachne and Athena, Lu’s participatory performance investigates spaces of collective and subjective memory.

Lu’s work explores the connection between experiential knowledge and the innate human capacity for empathy. Engaging vigorously with the present reality of all that is here-and-now, her context-specific - and often extremely intimate - works manifest in the resonant relationships created between herself and her audience, and between the audience members themselves.

Matthew MacKisack’s lecture performance The Incoherence of the Incoherence (2010) played by Jeffrey Baker, translates and restages a paper presented at the l’École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem in 1969. It describes an attempt to excavate the Biblical tomb of Lazarus, the failure to do so in the face of problems such as imaginary additions to ancient topographies, and a subsequent turn to aerial photography as an alternative to excavation.

The video begins and ends in Derby Museum and with Joseph Wright’s A Philosopher Lecturing on an Orrery, and also features re-created slides used during the lecture. The work queries disjunctions between ‘faith’ narratives and the empirical analysis of ‘fact’, the manifestation of ‘signs’ and miracles, and a corresponding search for scientific, archeological and anthropological evidence.

MacKisack’s work examines the ideological and subjective conditions under which the meaning and experience of objects or situations arise from the productive imagination. MacKisack’s presentations take the form of various media. He combines field recordings with sculptural or symbolic objects, video installations and performative writing.

Thursday, 2 December 2010, 7-9pm

7.00pm: Lynn Lu
7.45pm: Matthew MacKissack
8.15pm: Lynn Lu