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Dark Angels / Bright Devils (2004)
Feathers tattooed on a girls'
shoulder: a memory of angels' wings. Gothic lives, not as broken
treasures accumulated within museum vaults, but as a universal
youth culture where a dark language speaks love, rebellion and
romantic desire cloaked in black. The crucifix has acquired other
rituals, a semantic field in which it speaks to its inverted
other; the monks who calligraphed and decorated coloured manuscripts
scripts were tormented by the devil with sexual visions; his
work and theirs lives again today on the skin.
Intimate Landscapes, Public
Spaces (1999-2003)
An extending informel
art of desire, exquisite landscapes of colour originated deep
in the sexes of once-identified women: smears on glass made in
the 1970s, forgotten in the cellars of a Brussels clinic. Each
smear is unique; the medical gesture and the choice of stain
becomes an imaginary calligraphed portrait of a woman - doubly
inspired by her outward being and her body at its most intimate.
To rediscover this imaginary being we pass from one intimacy
to others, different scenes, public scenes. In the medallions,
a new generation makes love on the grass: private in public,
caresses in the sun oblivious of the chain of desires which link
their whispered words to a deeper Archeology, to loves longdisappeared,
unreproducible - yet transformed into the flesh of new generations.
Anatomy of Touch (2003-04)
Strangely autoerotic, anatomical
man with his exposed muscles and intestines, his poses snatched
from far-off mythological scenes, functions as a figure of scientific
instruction in a blank space. Repeated from various viewpoints,
the figure turns from frontal to profile view. Anatomical woman
sits improbably, her belly peeled open, a star-like fruit, showing
the foetus within. Through superimposition, Sina restores strange
narratives of passion, alerting us to the expressively of a hand
reaching out to touch, a finger placed upon a sex. 'Science'
rediscovers the language of desire which provoked the first anatomical
questions; neutral backgrounds become an intersubjective field
traversed by beckoning gestures which control a space now pregnant
with meaning. Hypotheses of homosexual encounter broach forbidden
territory, and are given graphic power with the intermingling
of yearning looks and delicately touching hand.
Sexuality and Rituals of Childbirth
(2002-03)
From East to West, the representations
of pregnancy and gestation in the medical maps of the body are
fraught with the cultural transmission of codes and styles -
and so often anomalous due to taboos, censure, blind spots. And
while science has a history of extraordinary progress, the physiological
processes of the act of love have remained until so recently
intuitive or hypothetical, a mystery.
Pills and Pearls (2002-03)
Pills, pearls, placebos, the
inside and the outside again play their roles in the search for
well-being and the embellishments of desire, bursting on the
flesh in colours and forms, Pleasure meets the vanitas;
the obsession to please at any price leads to a melancholy which
slowly infiltrates the whole of society.
Transfer x + (2003-04)
French Transfer. From Pharmacy
to Sex-Shop and back again. The live shows round Les Halles or
Pigalle surrounded their black-curtained facades with light-box
promises: skins of every colour: chocolate, blonde, eyes closed,
sexes open, which tumbled onto dank, night-time pavements. Not
and more in the France of Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac's
new right. The sex shop facades are blank; but the pharmacies
have become a riot of flesh, arching bodies, sweat and sea-spray,
creams applied, oils massaged over golden pores. The visual transfer
has a contrapuntal rhythm in this series; once again the moral
message is reduced to a comically manichaean order of Good versus
Evil. The State clean-up to protect minors from images of nudity
is powerless to contain the overflow of desire as it spreads
to reconquer new territory.
Snowdrift (2003)
At a point of extinction for
this female figure and, inexorably for her creator, the ice child
merges her cold body with melting snow. Edward Onslow Ford's
Snowdrift, 1901, his valedictory sculpture of marble,
agate and lapis lazuli, cased in glass, is pierced by the gazes
of an old woman and a young girl - two sculpted heads, at the
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. A sensory geography is
recast here for new spectators as a topography of desire, proposing
a space in which lovers may project memories of the body. Perfections
and imperfections of the loved object.
The Space between One and
One (1994-2002)
This project originated by observing
the delicate geometric divisions between public and private space
as couples progressively crowded the Kamo river bank and its
western borders near Gion, Kyoto, in 1994. As night advanced,
couples arrived from the bars, night clubs and and restaurants
of the old quarter, and sat in twos, creating a chain kilometres
long, the Shijo Ohashi bridge at a focal point in the centre.
Zeno's paradox was silently observed: spaces divided in half
as each couple arrived... The space between each couple too is
a space between one and one, traversed by the gesture of a hand,
a word, or a sense of emptiness: intimacy is always a question
of two solitudes. A measurable space, and subsequently an abstract
field of emotion, vibration and silence. A spontaneous urban
choreography where the geometries of the space between one and
one are in constant flux.
Torture Garden (2003-04)
From the Paris of François
Villon to Octave Mirbeau and his Jardin des Supplices
- thence to the cellars in gay quarters of the city where rites
of passage and orgiastic pain are prolonged in a world or leather
and chains on concrete: the reemergence of the archaic structures
of eroticism. Torture with its medieval erotics is transferred
to the world of urban sophisticate: the moment of the most intense
jouissance or unbearable frustration is represented minimally,
a floor of stone and darkness.
Intersubjective Jewellery
(2003)
Joy and joyaux - the same
archaeological roots. Desire locked in? A paradox. To be together
and bound in gold - but hand-cuffed, finger-cuffed? A delicate
play on materiality and intersubjectivity : the joy of desire
and its chains. The symbols of linkage are also symbols of prohibition,
like homosexual marriage - a subject very prominent in debates
on the left and right in France today.
Volcano (video, 5min, 2004) Dark
eruptions, liquid plumes, white nights.
Adrien Sina trained as an architect at Paris-Villemin
and the Architectural Association in London with Bernard Tschumi.
He was introduced to performance by Jochen Gerz. His work on
pre-Socratic philosophers has been essential for his art and
theoretical practice, and he has published two interviews with
philosopher Paul Virilio. He has exhibited extensively, from
Kyoto Future City Art Museum, 1994, to 'TransArchitectures 03'
NAi-Rotterdam, 1998, and at various institutions in France. Among
his curatorial projects are Fugitive Fluctuations for
the Espace d'Art Yvonamor Palix in Paris in 1995, Fugitive
Fluctuations mutation 2 (Ferme du Buisson Contemporary Art
Centre, Noisiel 1996) and the performance-based Tragédies
Charnelles, (Château de Pommery, Reims, 2000). He conceived
and edited special issues of La Mazarine on Tragédies
Charnelles + Fluctuations Fugitives and Immanences Spatiales,
the same year. In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art,
Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. He has taught extensively
in Europe and at the Pasadena Art Center and Sci-Arc in Los Angeles.
His experimental programme was most interestingly tested in the
volcanic French island territory of the Réunion (Indian
Ocean, 2001-2) where issues of interracial relations and collective
memory became the subject of student videos, performances and
works with new media. He will be presenting pioneer futurist
artist Valentine de Saint-Point at RoseLee Goldberg's Performa
Biennale, New York, October 2005. Adrien Sina lives and works
in Paris.
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