02 Apr 2011

Grantpirrie Gallery presents 'The Rehearsal of Repetition'

Curated by Anja Isabel Schneider



ULLA VON BRANDENBURG b. 1974, Germany. Lives and works in Paris.

MARIE COOL & FABIO BALDUCCI b. 1961, France, and 1964, Italy. Live and work in Paris.

DORA GARCIA b. 1965, Spain. Lives and works in Brussels.

FRANCK LEIBOVICI b. 1975. Lives and works in Paris.

BENOIT MAIRE b. 1978. Lives and works in Paris.

MEL O'CALLAGHAN b.1975, Sydney. Lives and works in Paris and Sydney.

Opens 6pm 31 March, including opening night performance of Franck Leibovici's Wikileaks-themed 'mini-opera for non-musicians': Memos, briefs and reports (2011).

Curator Anja Isabel Schneider in conversation with Franck Leibovici and Mel O'Callaghan, 3pm Saturday 2 April.



The Rehearsal of Repetition, opening at Grantpirrie, 6pm Thursday 31 March 2011, is guest curated by ex-Associate Director of Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris, Anja Isabel Schneider. The exhibition by seven international artists focuses on performativity and is inspired by Gertrude Stein's 'Portraits and Repetition', 1935.  

The Rehearsal of Repetition features film, installation and text-based work engaging with the theme of repetition. (In French, the word means both repetition and rehearsal).

The works consider the relationships between text and and its translatability; from a script to a performance, from a narrative to an object, from a piece of writing to an exhibition.

Franck Leibovici will present Memos, briefs and reports (2011), a 'mini-opera for non-musicians'. He will form a collective in which participants are invited to create their own scripts from the artist's archive of documents related to public problems and international issues.

Spanish artist Dora Garcia has a performance piece in which she imagines the show comedian Lenny Bruce would have given to a Sydney audience during his 1962 visit, had he not been arrested for obscenity and carted offstage after the first line: 'What a fucking wonderful audience'. Scripts and photographs of that eponymously titled performance will be presented as part of The Rehearsal of Repetition. 



Ulla von Brandenburg's performance film Chorspiel (2010) explores the notion of the Greek choir as an exterior voice of reason. Mel O'Callaghan's video projection To the end (2008) features a solitary figure dancing on the sands of Mont Saint Michel in France, and considers the etymology of the word 'choreography', from the Greek for 'circular dance' and 'writing', literally dance-writing. Benoit Maire's work le menteur (2011) is part of a trilogy, and comprises a wooden stereoscope and Maire's text The Aesthetics of Difference.

Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci's performance work depicts Cool performing simple, repeated, movements and gestures with everyday materials such as paper and string. A selection of video documentation will be on view: investigations into matter and materiality, states of transition and transformation. 



Most of the artists have exhibited widely in Europe and the United States but not yet in Australia. Grantpirrie is very pleased to allow Australian audiences an introduction to their work in Sydney.