2016
Elephant in the Room, 2016
Mild steel
Dimensions variable
Everton Ballardin
Elephant in the Room, 2016
Mild steel
Dimensions variable
Everton Ballardin
Elephant in the Room, 2016
Mild steel
Dimensions variable
Everton Ballardin
Interregnum, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, 2016
Everton Ballardin
Interregnum, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, 2016
Next Door (the missing subject), 2010-12
Digital HD, 30 mins
Interregnum
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Gramschi's analysis represents a condition of tensed-time, a live proposal. It is about the current time, the present time. Time of performance, time of the present situation and of the participants themselves.
This is what a performance is: a live proposal in the present-future, a present that is caught between an anticipated future and a past memory.
There is an idiomatic expression in English language, elephant in the room. It means that there is an obvious great issue which is visible to everyone but no one can talk about it. Just like interregnum, the elephant in the room describes another facet of suspension, an incomplete state of what I called in a past work Nul Comma Nul. In other words 0, 0 makes nothing.
From the 70s onwards I have explored the idea of intersection, lacuna, gap, fracture, breach, interstice in performance, installation, sculpture, as well as film, photography, painting, drawing and sound works.
It seems to me that capitalism is a breach, albeit a long forced separation of human beings in the search for a dignified existence.
Stuart Brisley,
London, August 2016
2 September - 22 October 2016