Slide

Tavares Strachan: There is Light Somewhere
塔瓦雷斯·斯特拉坎:某處有光

18 Jun –⁠ 1 Sep 2024
Hayward Gallery, London

They were all assembled there. Not purely a history but an assembly of the dead with a sense of voices being released. Voices from the deep. What the exhibition presents is the possibility of releasing these voices in a rich tapestry of becoming. We can see Nina Simone, both as semblance and mask, but where is her song and voice. Nowhere, everywhere: it follows us in an imaginary space of the unrealised beyond. There are spaces here of the absolute, black spaces, which arrive and depart before and after the image. History is condensed there, in these black holes. All these utterances all condensed into this deepest of all recesses, which gives rise to the possibility of an infinite space of writing and memory traces.

他們聚集於此,不僅僅是一段歷史的重現,更是一場逝者的集會,一場聲音得以釋放的儀式。那些聲音,來自深處,回響於無形之中。這場展覽展現了釋放這些聲音的可能性——它們交織成一幅充滿生命力的「成為」的織錦。我們看到了妮娜·西蒙,她既是一種象徵,又是一張面具。然而,她的歌聲與靈魂的聲音在哪裡?它無處可尋,卻又無所不在:它在我們之間游走,存在於一個未實現的、超越性的虛構空間之中。

這裡有一種絕對的空間——漆黑的深淵,在影像出現之前與消失之後降臨或退場。歷史濃縮於此,匯聚於這些黑洞般的隱秘之地。一切聲音與言語都被壓縮進這最深的裂隙,卻也因此孕育出一個無限的書寫與記憶痕跡的空間。

Inner Elder (Nina Simone as Queen of Sheba), 2023 Ceramic 39 3⁄8 H x 23 5⁄8 W x 23 5⁄8 D in 100 x 60 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Strachan said that he wasn’t interested in space without time, especially the time of the yet to come. The show reverberates with echoes of the yet to come. We are not assembled to hear voices of the dead but to hear songs of the future.

斯特拉坎表示,他對沒有時間的空間並不感興趣,尤其是那尚未到來的時間。本次展覽迴盪著「尚未到來之物」的回聲。我們聚集於此,並非為了傾聽逝者的聲音,而是為了捕捉來自未來的歌聲。

Installation view of Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere. Intergalactic Palace, 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Imagine an infinite library. It is on the walls or free standing in space. Are we being looked at? The Queen of England in conversation with the Queen of Sheba, everything is being told as if twice over. What has been hidden, then finding release into another kind of light. Is this a history of light, after all light is required to be seen and to see.

想像一座無限的圖書館,其書架延伸於牆面,或懸立於空間。我們是否正在被注視?英國女王與示巴女王展開對話,一切仿佛都被訴說了兩次。一切隱藏的事物最終被釋放,投射入另一種光芒之中。這會是一部光的歷史嗎?畢竟,光既是我們能夠看見之物,也是我們用以看見的工具。

Arise King Tubby and a new possibility of editing sound. You are centuries old now, monumental, like those Egyptian heads trapped within the British Museum. Museums knows how to assemble the dead because things are written in advance of appearance. There is good order to all of this and anything that might be heard is rendered mute. For there to be a release from this schema, there needs to be another apparatus with which to present, a multi-dimensional reassembly. We need King Tubby’s sound system to hear many voices at the same time, another spacing of sound.

起來吧,King Tubby,為聲音的剪輯帶來新的可能性。你如今已經跨越數個世紀,宏偉如同那些被囚禁於大英博物館的埃及雕像。博物館善於組裝逝者,因為一切在現身之前就已被預先書寫,所有的事物井然有序。然而,任何可能被聽見的聲音卻被壓抑成沉默。若要突破這種體系,釋放出這些聲音,必須擁有一種新的多維呈現裝置。我們需要 King Tubby 的音響系統來同時聽到多重聲音,一種全新的聲音空間的誕生。

Installation view of Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere. Intergalactic Palace, 2024, and Ruin of a Giant (King Tubby), 2024. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

A man and a woman are released into the space of the gallery. They are without name. How can voices from the future be named anyway? There voices possess a purity of the empty word that clears the way. Was it the great poets of the Tang Dynasty founded their poetic vision on the difference between the full and empty word? It survives within the circulations of these performers, but with a celestial echo.

Next to this is the voice of Gil Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. We are reminded that America was divided in the modern period between the imported European cultural matrix of an open future and an Afro-American figure of hip. Gil Scott-Heron was hip which means that he saw things differently. Hip predates the imported version of modernity and is therefore a different memory system that dates to the 1700’s with the slave system. The original word is hipi which means to open one’s eyes. To be hip is in some way to be party to the process of circulating voices and repeating songs. The language for doing so was disguised, secret, caught within the nuances of the offbeat, or a beat skipped altogether. Hip entered the mainstream through music, speech, poetry, and gesture as both rupture and rapture. Hip was sensual and dangerous, always on the move, breaking the boundary lines that might patrol all the lines so neatly in place.

So, this assemblage of works is possessing a sense of stories untold, of limits being explored, of cross overs even cross dressing, voices recorded and dispersed, narratives told in new ways, fragments and montages presented, diagrams and layers all striving to draw connective tissue into the arrest of figures. All of this calls upon the faculties to open the valves of sense and to be alive to all the criss-crossing of forms and idioms.

一位男人與一位女人被釋放進畫廊的空間。他們沒有名字。而未來的聲音,又怎能被命名呢?這些聲音擁有某種空靈之詞的純粹,掃清一切障礙,為未來鋪設通道。唐代詩人是否正是藉由實詞與虛詞之間的微妙差異建立起他們的詩意視野?這種詩意如今以天籟般的回聲存續於表演者的聲音循環之中。

緊鄰的是吉爾·斯科特-赫倫(Gil Scott-Heron)的聲音——“革命不會被電視直播”(The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)。我們被提醒,現代美國的文化曾被分為兩個矩陣:來自歐洲的未來敞開性,以及非裔美國人象徵的「hip」文化。吉爾·斯科特-赫倫便是「hip」的化身,這意味著他以不同的方式看待世界。「Hip」早於歐洲現代性的輸入,作為一種不同的記憶系統,其根源可追溯至18世紀的奴隸制度。「Hip」的原詞是“hipi”,意為「睜開眼睛」。成為「hip」,某種程度上意味著參與聲音的流動與歌曲的重複。這種語言被巧妙隱藏,潛藏於節拍的細微差異中,或完全跳過的節奏之間。「Hip」通過音樂、語言、詩歌與肢體動作進入主流,作為一種斷裂與狂喜的表現形式。它既感性又危險,始終處於運動中,打破所有整齊劃一的界限,越過那些巡邏的邊界。

因此,這場展覽不僅是一次未被講述的故事的集合,更是一場對極限的探索與邊界的跨越,甚至包括跨性別的展演。這裡的聲音被記錄、散佈,敘事以嶄新的方式展開;片段與蒙太奇並置,圖示與層次交疊,一切都試圖將碎片化的敘事與形象的停頓聯繫起來。展覽召喚我們的感官,打開感知的閥門,去捕捉形式與語彙之間交錯的流動,並在這交匯中感受到生命的律動與活力。

 

 

Text by Jonathan Miles

Edited by Michelle Yu

                   

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