15/07—18/09/2011
exhibition
The Allies
Jesse Aron Green
- The exhibition’s highlight is the three-channel video The Allies, documenting an attempt to reconstruct the Battle of Cambrai, which took place in November 1917.
- Jesse Aron Green is an American artist of the young generation, whose works often take the form of spatial installations combining drawing, film, photography, performance, music and text. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in the traditions of various forms of socially engaged art, informed by feminism and institutional critique.
- The exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art is also the premiere of a project realized during the artist’s residency in Warsaw in 2010. The three-channel video The Allies documents an extremely original attempt at a performative reconstruction of selected aspects of the Battle of Cambrai, which took place in November 1917 during the First World War. Green’s installation embodies some of the theories of Wilfred Bion, a tank commander in the battle and a psychoanalyst, on group dynamics. The film was shot by Piotr Szczepański, and the music was created by M. C. Schmidt, one half of the duo Matmos.
- Before filming, the group of young women and men taking part in the project underwent a series of lessons and exercises that allowed them to read and interpret different types of movement notation, including Labanotation (one of the methods of recording choreographic patterns on paper in the form of abstract symbols, developed by Rudolf Laban) and conceptual instructions (such as those used by Sol LeWitt, for example). On the set, they received a new, previously unknown, battle score, which they played together using knowledge acquired during training. The full process of working together, performing, and sharing feedback afterwards was filmed by three cameras in Redoubt Rooms of the Grand Theatre in Warsaw, in lighting corresponding with the different times of day, from sunrise to sunset.
- The visual precision of the film, combined with an unexpected five-minute, audio-only interlude, reflects the tension between mastery of the war cipher-like notation and the attempt to precisely recreate the received instructions; between individual emotions and real, perhaps unconscious, cooperation.
- Participants: Nikola Adamus, Andrea Bohlman, Greg Czarnecki, Andrzej Czerniawski, Wojciech Dąbek, Monika Dąbrowska, Joanna Kania, Marta Kaźmierczak, Katarzyna Kosieradzka, Michał Kowalski, Elwira Kozłowska, Paweł Piasecki, Adrian Krajewski, Ula Siemion, Dominik Skrzypkowski, Kuba Snochowski.
- Jesse Aron Green was born in Boston in 1979. He studied at UCLA and Harvard. He lives and works in Boston and Los Angeles. His previous work Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik was shown at a solo exhibition at Oil Tanks, Tate Modern. His work was also presented at the Whitney Biennial 2010 in New York and at ICA Boston, among others. He is a scholarship holder of The Henry Luce Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding and CEC Artslink. In 2010 he was artist-in-residence at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art.
