GHost-dance: ghosts as cultural and political movement
GHost Hostings 11 and 12 a call for submissions
Call for papers, presentations, performance and dance for an interdisciplinary seminar and performance event – the so-called 'GHost Hostings'. Hostings 11 and 12 take the GHost project's research in a new direction.
Deadline for submissions – March 16th
The Hostings are supported by the
Centre for Performance at CSM, University of the Arts.
Venue: CSM, University of the Arts, Granary
Building, 1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA
Dates: 17th April, 6pm - 9pm – LVMH Lecture
Theatre
21st May, 6pm – 9pm – Studio
Theatre (dance and performance space)
“Standing on the hill where so many
people were buried in a common grave, standing there in that cold
darkness under the stars, I felt tears running down my face. I can’t
describe what I felt. I heard the voices of the long-dead ghost
dancers crying out to us.”
(Leonard Crow Dog, during the American
Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973).
In the last decades of the nineteenth
century, self proclaimed prophet Wovoka, of the Paiute people, became
the figure-head for the Ghost Dance - a religious movement adopted by
a significant number of the Native American Nations. Central to this
belief was a communal ritualised dance, inducing a trance state, in
which it was believed the souls of the dead and living would be
reunited and their land returned to them. In the 1970s the Ghost
Dance was revived as part of the Red Power Movement, with the
activists group AIM (American Indian Movement) at its forefront,
fighting for Native American civil rights. The ghost in the Ghost
Dance was a revitalising force for a people whose land and loved ones
had been taken from them and who were facing cultural genocide.
The Spiritualist movement in nineteenth
century U.S.A provided a forum in which women, whose role in society
was very much surpressed, could give voice to their opinions in a
public arena. Appeals for women’s emancipation and the abolition of
slavery could be expressed under the guise of a ghost voice, allegedly
channelled through the medium.
At the same time in Europe, in the
opening sentences of Marx and Engle’s Communist Manifesto, “A
Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” Communism
could be said to have been conceptualised as a powerful ghostly
presence, waiting to materialise and take shape within the living as
a force for revolutionary change.
GHost is seeking proposals for thirty
minute papers, performances, performative presentations, contemporary
or traditional dance and ritual performance encompassing all
disciplines and fields of interest.
Submissions may address, but not be
restricted to, one or more of the following:
·Ghosts as a political or cultural
voice within marginalised or disenfranchised communities.
·The embodying of ghosts within ritual
and performance to instigate socio-cultural or political change.
·Ghosts as a healing and unifying
presence within marginalised cultural groups or genders.
·The appropriation of the ghost-dance,
and other forms of spirit–possession, within contemporary art.
·The ghost narrative as a political
device within rhetoric, writing, film, visual art or popular culture
(fiction and non-fiction).
Please send a (working) title and an abstract of approximately 300 - 400 words, a brief biography and, if applicable, a couple of photographs or links to film clips documenting your performance or dance.
Please send submissions to Sarah
Sparkes and Aldworth Howard at:
Between 5.30-7.00pm, in response to Sharon Kivland's exhibition, Sarah Sparkes of GHost invites Birgitta Hosea, Peter Suchin and Sarah Wood to interrogate ideas pertaining to 'haunting' in both Kivland's work and the gallery space itself. This evening's Hosting will initiate an apocryphal archiving of Reproductions II – an immaterial revenant to haunt the invited guests.
Birgitta Hosea is a digital artist, and Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of M.A. Character Animation at CSM. Her current work investigates photographic manipulation and theatricality in Victorian Spirit Photography and mediumistic performances.
Peter Suchin is an artist and critic, contributing to Art Monthly, Frieze, The Guardian, and many other journals.
Sarah Sparkes is an artist, curator and researcher. She leads the GHost project. Initiated in 2008, GHost provides a supporting platform enabling invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.
Sarah Wood is Senior Lecturer at The School of English, University of Kent. She is Managing Editor of The Oxford Literary Review and a founder of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
'GHost Hostings 10: A Haunted Reproduction' will be part of a day of closing events on Saturday 16th February for Sharons Kivland's exhibition Reproductions II. Places are limited and must be reserved in advance. Please email the gallery if you wish to attend: INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM
On the final afternoon of Sharon Kivland’s exhibition Reproductions II
We cordially invite you to an afternoon of select walking tours, discussions, book presentations and hauntings,
these events are all free however numbers are strictly limited and places must be reserved on a first come basis:
After a break in 2011, to participate
in Folkestone Triennial, GHost returned to St Johns to haunt this
wonderful John Soane's church for the fourth time.
The exhibition and program of events, as in previous GHost
shows, featured moving image installations, performance and
film screenings, but this time with the addition of live sound
performances.
Artworks in the exhibition were selected in
response to a programme of interdisciplinary seminars - the Hostings
- held at the University of London throughout 2012. The
Hostings together with GHost's programme of visual arts exhibitions are designed to make manifest, and by extension examine, the
aesthetics of ghosts and haunted spaces. This year GHost explored two
themes: absence - haunted landscapes and presence - manifesting
ghosts.
A separation between presence and
absence was created by installing works that interrogate the idea of
ghostly manifestations in the atrium and belfry and haunted landscape
works within the gallery and nave.
Thank you to the GHost artists and to all the guests for making this such a memorable event.
PRESENCE
Calum F Kerr's, epic
performance Threshold Figure bridged the space
between presence and absence. Positioned across the imposing doorway of the nave of St Johns he demanded, in a doom-laden voice, that guests offer a sacrifice in exchange for a coin thus gaining
passage through the wings of his expansive gate-like cloak. Many made that crossing, feeling their way through the darkness and cloying draperies of The Threshold figure's cloak, to emerge blinking in the light from the movie screen beyond, perhaps reflecting on the wisdom of their sacrifice.
Mario Lautier Vella has experienced an
actual haunting at his home and made the work Domestic in response to this. Vella draped the left wing of the atrium with curtains; falling the whole length of the high curving stair well they created the distinct feeling that something was hiding behind them. In the corner, a mirrored box sat on top of a mirrored cabinet casting rainbow reflections all about. Inside the box a film featured a sinister masked figure with what could be either its double or a reflection. The drawers of the cabinet contained the paraphernalia of ghost hunting, exorcisms the séanceroom and the two masks from the film – is this an invitation to be both ghost and ghost hunter?
Anne Robinson's An Occulting Light was
projected onto a large screen in the right atrium of St Johns. The screen, draped with white cloth, was reminiscent
of a ship's sail. Robinson's eerie and mesmerising film featured
footage from the 'the cruel sea' slowed down to such a degree
that each frame seemed to melt and slide into the next, the
image breaking down into a surface evocative of shimmering reflections on the ocean at night. The accompanying soundtrack featured the artist singing sea shanties and nautical hymns in a voice so distorted
and inhuman that it sent shivers
down the listeners back as they listened on their cordless headphones.
Paul Coates observes that ‘both film
and the Spiritualist materialize the dead’ (Coates 1984: 121)8*; or
at least they give the illusion of doing so. Artist Birgitta Hosea's
performance Medium powerfully
demonstrated both these 'illusions'.
In the cavernous belfry
space the artist performed the actions of a medium in trance state,
producing automatic writing onto an electronic drawing tablet upon
her lap – the contemporary equivalent of spirit slate writing.
Behind Hosea the marks appeared simultaneously on a large screen
whilst she voiced the question, “is anybody there?” Rapping
noises issued from concealed speakers, seemingly in response.
Images, in the projected film, made using digital animation
techniques, featured the artist enacting the roles of notable female
Victorian mediums and an array of spectral figures, fading in and
out, against a backdrop of swirling cotton wool - a substance
favoured by Victorian spirit photographers to simulate ectoplasm. The
insubstantial projected images appear to be emanating from the
artist whilst at the same time she attempts to merge her corporeal
body with their illusory presence.
*Thanks Tom Ruffles, whose excellent
book Ghost Images: cinema and the afterlife was invaluable
for me own research and in which drew my attention to Paul Coates
article in New Left Review.
ABSENCE
Artists Arabella Lee and Pauline Thomas
frequently collaborate in the creation of moving image installation
within buildings and other architectural structures. Both Lee's and
Thomas's work was installed in the Gallery space, with projections
made direct onto a doorway (Lee) or wall (Thomas).
Lee's works Illion East portrayed the
landscape, as a haunting presence, with respect to both the notion of
tragic memory embedded within a specific locale and within the
dreamlike image sequence leading the viewer deeper into a landscape
of overgrown pathways and mossy ruins. The film is accompanied by a
narrative constructed through the voices of two elderly neighbours
from the area. They talk of the places tragic past and their stories
haunt the images.
photograph by Pauline Thomas
In Thomas's film Loomings the
ghost-like outline of a ship emerges through sea-fog. The presence
of a vast ocean is conjured up within the modestly sized frame of the
projected image. For the viewer, the effect is one of disruption to
spacial perceptions, as the materiality of the underlying structures
absents itself beneath the illusory presence of the seascape
projected onto its surface. The half concealed ship, suddenly
making an appearance, gliding though the fog, is more insubstantial
than a sea mist, the only concrete presence is the stone wall into
which it is projected.
The landscape, in both Lee's and
Thomas's installations, becomes a threshold space; a portal into an
uncanny vista into which the mind may travel and the body feels it
could almost follow.
Phillip Raymond Goodman's moving image
installation Homeward shared the gallery space with Lee and Thomas
and also made use of the infrastructures already in the building.
Goodman placed a small portable DVD player upon a music stand he
found in the Gallery. The piece could only be viewed and listened
to by one person at a time, which together with the screen's small
scale, gave the work an intimate and personal quality. The looped
film featured footage, shot from the top deck, of a bus journey at
night. The landscape here was urban and banal, yet rendered wondrous
and otherworldly by 'the noise' and distortions created by the
digital camera and the bus windows. The disembodied , recorded
voice, announcing the names of the bus stops, gave the work a
rhythmical, hypnotic quality which worked conceptually with its
placement on the music stand.
HAUNTED LANDSCAPES SHOWREEL
Throughout GHost IV a programme of
artist films on the theme of Haunted Landscapes was show on the big
screen in the nave.
Sharon Kivland's Reisen: The limped
waters of mountain lakes, The snow on alpine peaks and The smoke of
steam trains consists of three landscape image sequences, organised
thematically. For some time, Kilvand has been collecting found
photographic images and postcards. The Reisen trilogy features
re-photographed, antique black and white landscape photographs from
this collection. Re-photographed from old postcards, each film is
subtitled ‘Every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday with his
brother, Alexander’. The suggestion is that the viewer is
receiving postcards from Freud, direct from the past. The images may
be a reference to Freud's own neurosis around trains and train
journeys. These sublime landscape are also
archetypal symbols loaded with psychoanalytical meaning. Projected
on such a large scale and framed by the imposing architecture of a
church nave, Kivland's films took on an epic and theatrical quality –
a sermon on the haunting nature of photography.
Neil Wissink's Pugwash plays with
documentation and fabrication. Footage, of an abandoned farm in Nova
Scotia belonging to Wissink's ancestors was payed to a medium, whose
live reading of the footage was recorded and subsequently used as the
soundtrack for the film. Other sound effects such bird song,
possibly from field recordings or live sound from the locations,
merges with the mediums high, sing-song voice. The landscapes are
empty of people, only gravestones, or abandoned buildings remain as
evidence of human habitation, and, all the while the medium suggests ghosts - absent beings in a distant place.
Sally Waterman's February is one of a
series of short poetic films; documenting the artists experience of death and loss, it serves as a visual diary. A sea voyage to the Isle
of Wight, to attend a funeral of a close family friend, is portrayed
via a series of images shot through the boat's window. It is a world
of water. The waves beyond the window, the Water droplets on its
glass, read as a metaphor for grieving – tears in an
overwhelming ocean of grief. Donna McKevitt's haunting musical score
adds to the feeling of sorrow. The final frame shows the pier as the
boat is about to dock - the sudden ending of a journey.
Tall towers in an otherwise empty
landscape, stand ominously silent in the twilight. This was
GRUNSKE, by Sabine Schöbel, a portrait of the Palace of the
Republic in Berlin which once a symbol of nostalgia for the GDR. The
towers have since been demolished and so watching the film could was
something like viewing their ghosts. Skeletal already at the time of
filming, they never -the-less seem impenetrable and eternal. The
film switches between shots of the towers and passages where the
screen is black and empty. During these 'black-outs' the noise
recorded on sight could be heard at a high volume. The noise was
displaced from it's corresponding image and effect was a jolt to the
viewers senses and the ghosts of the towers entered the void space
of the screen via auditory channels.
The landscape in Hayley Lock's Blue
Light is a vast presence, serving as a stage or backdrop, to the
action played out by five awkward characters inside a stately home.
The house is Cromer Hall on the North Norfolk coast where Arthur
Conan Doyle stayed and drew inspiration for his tale 'The Hound of
the Baskervilles'. Lock draws on stories of the ghost of The Black
Shuck, a demon dog that is said to run the coastal and corpse paths
from Sheringham to Overstrand and merges these with Enid Blighton's
Secret Seven in the most delightfully creepy way. The narrators
silken and somewhat sinister voice imbues his words with a magical
quality. Together with the drone of the sound track and deliberate
yet dream-like actions of the characters it makes for a bewitching
experience. This enchantment was further enhanced by the smell of
incense, which always pervades st. Johns. The motif of the dark
glass which Lock refers to as her talisman, makes regular appearances,
its dark reflective surface seems to hide impenetrable secrets.
ADRIFT – HAUNTED SOUNDSCAPES
On the night of Friday 7th
December, GHost hosted an night of sound performances in the nave of
st Johns.
Jude Cowan Montague opened the night
with a wonderful improvised score upon the church organ. The old
church organ is in clear view from the nave and organ music was
swirling up into the rafters, but where was the organist – it
looked as if the organ was uncannily playing itself? The old church
organ is in fact defunct and Cowan Montague was concealed behind the
altar playing the new one. Her playing - otherworldly carnival meets
church processional - evoked the spirit of the film Carnival of Souls
and drew served to summon the audience to take their seats in the
pews and prepare themselves to be transported by haunted sounds-capes.
When the organ music ceased members of
MYSTERIUM and myself slowly processed up the aisle of the nave –
the processional performance has become a sort of GHost tradition
introduced by Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly in 2008. Our processional
route completed, the nave was plunged into darkness and STASIS 73
began their 30 minute live audio installation, LIVE_TRANSMISSION.
In the darkness shadows, cast by
the city lights outside, danced across the ceiling whilst STASIS 73
transported the 'congregation' into a haunted landscape conjured up
from field recordings and live sound interventions. The work had a
narrative feeling; it felt like experiencing a journey to someone
else’s memory as so many good stories do. The sound-scape filled the
nave as did the listeners own 'thought pictures'; the parameters of
both space and time inside the church and without coming into
question.
Through their performance, a
musical evocation - to the self-portrait painting by the artist
SAMUEL PALMER, MYSTERIUM embodied the role of correspondents
between the spiritual and material world – a role which Palmer
himself believed in. A projected self-portrait of the young Palmer
gazed soulfully back at the audience. Combined with the sublimely
spiritual sounds of Kevin Quigley and Christos Fanaras, Palmer's image
become an almost material presence. MYSTERIUMS beautiful performance
grew in intensity, coming to a euphoric crescendo which resonated
through the both material and immaterial presences.
Anne Robinson's Alive Alive-O was given
its debut screening and provided the perfect climactic ending to the
night - its nautical theme following on perfectly from the Haunted
sea film screening. In Alive Alive- O the film has been shot almost
as if from the perspective of a ghost trapped inside the hull of an
empty ruined ship. A familiar folk song provides the soundtrack,
made in collaboration with David Cross, formerly of King Crimson, it
is sung with powerful emotion by Anne herself. The shape of the
boats hull is mirrored in the hammer beam roof of st Johns and, as
Anne's ghost vocals culminate in a wailing cry of grief, we could all
have been passengers in a ghost ship, lost souls adrift in the ocean.
