The moving image work and installation of James Richards builds up associative and expressive connections between found materials — from low-fi reportage and online fragments, to highly wrought digital renderings – alongside material from his own archive. Here the texture, weight and feel of images and sounds are worked and reworked: a slow and precisely arbitrary process, which introduces a level of emotional charge and desire into materials and their connections.
“Of Disturbance” is Richards’ first solo exhibition in China, and brings together two works that closely resonate with his approach, giving insight into the artist’s process and relation with gesture, rhythm and juxtaposition. The exhibition includes his early work Untitled (Cinema Programme – an 18-minute video assemblage from 2006 that navigates a symbolic and fragmentary score of images and sounds, layered with composer Arvo Pärt’s Passus (1982) and a recording of a friend of the artist reading extracts from John Giorno’s poem Completely Attached to Delusion (1981).
The Misty Suite (2009), the second video work, steps in and out of definition; with close attention to zoom speeds, the camera takes us closer to and gradually beyond representation. The work builds an active process of reconstitution and manipulation that also pushes images and signs into a space of uncertainty: an insistence on friction and slowing down, and attentiveness to forms of knowing and feeling, working beyond the immediacy of direct communication.
In collaboration with Magician Space, the exhibition takes place in tandem with a touring event programme – a series of screenings and talks developed by Richards and Electra’s Fatima Hellberg, with works by Stuart Baker, Julia Heyward, Wu Tsang and Richards, taking place at UCCA Beijing, OCAT Shenzhen, OCAT Xi’an and Asia Art Society, Hong Kong to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong. Focusing on subjects such as the embodiment and relaying of material, honesty and directness, and appropriation, the presentation seeks to uncover and examine their forms in a series of still and moving images.
Notes to Editors
James Richards (born 1983, Cardiff, Wales) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Screens, Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey (2013); James Richards, Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan (2012); and Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); Meanwhile… Suddenly and Then, 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2013); Otherwise Unexplained Fires, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (2013); and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York, USA (2013).
Electra is a London based contemporary art organisation, which curates, commissions and produces projects by artists working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts. Through close dialogue with a range of venues and collaborators, we present our projects across the UK and internationally. At the heart of our practice is a process-based relationship between artist, curator and audiences, which seeks to give the projects space to find their own rhythm, public outputs, and discourse.
www.electra-productions.com
