Documentalist

Documentalist, the product of an international collective consisting of Chris Evans, Deimantus Narkevicius and Suzanne Treister, seeks to combine international affairs, war, sci-fi and mysticism. Normally, curation without clear labels is annoying, but in the Collective Gallery it becomes a catalyst for communication and cross-fertilisation between the different artist’s works, enriching the viewer’s experience. The highlight of the show is Narkevicius’s video ‘Revisiting Solaris’. A beautiful creation, it pulls the viewer in on a perfectly tensioned line of intrigue, loose enough that you don’t know where it’s taking you, but taut enough that you know there is a final destination. ‘Revisiting Solaris’ deftly resolves a range of aesthetics, narrative contents and techniques, and is aptly described on the web catalogue as “hauntingly beautiful”.

The first room showcases Treister’s ‘Alchemy 2007/8’ series of prints, with Evans’ ‘Repeat Horizon' sculpture in the middle. Treister’s prints reappropriate the headlines and news of various international newspapers into hand-drawn alchemical diagrams. The hand-drawn quality convinces the viewer they are not just cold informational diagrams, but this overt human touch also communicates a lack of thorough systematisation of content, which does not impel the viewer to analyse it more thoroughly. Evans’ sculpture is a large eye stencil sprayed onto a set of blinds. An eye on blinds is a clever pun, but the lack of cohesion with Treister’s prints makes seeing much further into it difficult.

The next room contains Triester’s wall paintings ‘A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security’, along with Evans’ ‘The School for Improvement’ video and ‘Warm Hermaphrodite’ sculpture. Treister’s paintings are a chronologically progressing series of jewel-coloured Kabbalistic images, each containing key science fiction novels, and the weapon or security technology (fictional and real) featured. The technologies cited range from a bow-tie voice changer to the atomic bomb. This keeps the viewer on their toes; unsure whether to regard the diagrams as amusing, factual or polemical. Naturally, sci-fi can be any or all of these, which marks the work as both a faithful homage and exegetical anthology to the driving theme behind it: that of mankind’s relationship with its technologies.

Immediately opposite this work is the low point of the show, Evans’ ‘The School for Improvement’. The video is brought down—and brings the exhibition down—by two food-related criticisms: cod philosophy and hammy acting. Fortunately for the overall experience, Evans’ elegant and provoking sculpture ‘Warm Hermaphrodite’ is in a class of its own, a sculptural haiku on the relationship between nature, technology and man, and wouldn’t look out of place at a Magritte exhibition.