Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Graeme Arnfield, Ieva Epnere, David Kasprzak,
Daria Melnikova, Tadasu Takamine
26 February–17 April 2016
Opening Friday 26 February 7-9pm
I don’t know if you’ve noticed my absence, or maybe you have become used to it. It’s hard to calculate how long I’ve been gone or if I’ve been gone long enough to warrant calculation. Before I arrived in my present situation time was bounded—now that I’m here it’s inexhaustible.I am writing you partially as an attempt to consume this time, but also to record it, should someone find this.
The room—yes I’m pretty sure it’s a room—I’ve been inhabiting is exceptionally unremarkable besides the effect that it seems to have had on myself and my cohabitants, but I’ll return to that. Rows of institutional chairs line three of the four Escape Gray™ walls. (It’s the name of a shade of gray I saw on a paint sample sheet. I think it’s close.) All of the usual paraphernalia that decorates rooms such as this one seems to have congregated in the center of the space in a perplexing configuration. I’m sure it’s conversing about information that I haven’t been privy to.
A clock is the only object that decided to stay in its location on the wall. It’s one of those black rectangular ones with the red LEDs that are much brighter than necessary. The time hasn’t changed since I’ve been writing you. Checking it has become a ritual. Look up. Look back down. Wait for the afterimage of the red lights to disappear. Count to sixty. Look back up. I’m not even sure that the rule of sixty seconds applies here or to this particular clock. Another unsettling feature of this room is the low droning sound coming from somewhere within the ceiling, like a bow running against a saw blade. The drone itself could be soothing in another situation. The unsettling part is speculating about its origin.
As I mentioned before, this room has had an unusual effect on me and the others. I would ask them if they had noticed it too, but I can tell by the way they are looking at their hands that we’re sharing this experience. Everything in the room is in sharp focus except my own body and the figures of the others. If you hold your hand in front of your face but focus on something in the distance you can get a sense of what I’m experiencing. My own outlines are slightly vibrating.
The only person in sharp focus is a woman in a sterile gray dress who has entered the room several times. Each time she leaves, she takes one of the others with her. How she enters and exits remains a mystery, as I cannot see any doors, windows, hatches, or otherwise. On her last visit I asked her about the blurriness I was experiencing. She said that we are only archetypes or stand-ins for other people. It wasn’t necessary for us to be in sharp focus since we wouldn’t be recognized anyway. When I asked where she was taking the others she said that she was simply acting on behalf of someone else that we would never meet and that we would be given no more information.
Since I’ve been writing you three of the others have been returned by the woman in the gray dress. The first explains to me that she was taken to the foot of a great pyramid, but instead of sand she found herself surrounded by an expanse of frozen fjords sloping into glacier fields. The second found himself in Japan following a catastrophic event, and the third was placed in Palestine to investigate the murder of two children.
I’m afraid I must finish this record quickly. The woman in the gray dress has returned and appears to be walking directly toward me.
* This text is part of an ongoing work by David Kasprzak commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
** Something eerie transpires between the fiction and the reality of our times – think protocols, crises and meltdowns; causes without effects and effects without causes.
