A Foundation – Liverpool Biennial: Touched
18 September – 28 November 2010
A Foundation will host two artists in the Liverpool Biennial 2010 exhibition; Touched. The artists Sachiko Abe and Antti Laitinen have been asked to become catalysts in an exploration of the feedback loops between artist and audience. For both temporality itself has become critical once again, not only as a challenge to the materiality and exaggerated materialism of the art market but perhaps because we are increasingly aware of different temporal scales, such as the instantaneity of history after 9/11 and the slow arrival of ecological catastrophe.
Sachiko Abe is best known for her mesmerizing series of durational performances Cut Papers that create a surplus of meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy. It is this scenic space of perception and production that is the focus of the work. Abe will present performances in an environment of large-scale sculptural interventions in the Furnace gallery with a new large scale drawing work produced during her 2010 residency with A Foundation funded by the Pola Foundation. An intricate graphic weave produced by intensive durational periods of drawing which might be best approached through the dimension of the fold as expressed by French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like Cut Papers Abe’s drawings invite us to contemplate the intensity of ideas which accumulate and are disseminated in the transformation of a white sheet of paper into a medium of communication. She will also present a new filmic collaboration with artist Ben Rivers.
Antti Laitinen works across idioms of performance, video and photography in a collective mission to stage mythologies and erase the boundary between success and failure through a trajectory of personal endurance and almost delusional imagination. Laitinen takes us beyond the normal realms of the world into a new reality at once both innocent and yet haunted by the knowledge of our contemporary ecological crisis. He encapsulates an artistic vision that explores the imperfect resolution of the world when faced with the sublime limits of our imagination. He says of his work: “It is more important to struggle for your dreams than succeeding in them.”
Venue details
Sachiko Abe ‘Cut Papers’