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Suzanne Treister
3 Projects
11 September - 25 October 2008
Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to present 3 new Projects
by Suzanne Treister: Alchemy, Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe
and War Artists.
Alchemy takes information from front covers of daily newspapers; The
Financial Times, Jüdische Allgemeine, Al-Ahram, Dziennik Polski,
The Guardian, Le Figaro and The New York Times, and transcribes this
into
alchemical drawings, reframing the world as a place animated by strange
forces, powers and belief systems. These works redeploy the languages
and intentions of alchemy: the transmutation of materials and essences
and the revealed understanding of the world as a text, as a realm of
powers
and correspondences which, if
properly understood, will allow man to take on transformative power.
The Alchemy series includes also a 5.5 metre wall drawing, A Timeline
of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security. Treister
has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic
military technology. The format in which she organises this information
is the
schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot,
from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation
of linkages
between the worlds above
and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between
these realms.
In Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe 324 sheets of letterheaded
paper from governments, presidential offices, embassies, NGOs, arms companies
and corporations are reproduced in pencil and arranged in 9 cool elegant
grids. The grids crackle with the invisible energy of exchange, of correspondence,
of plotting, of the covert and the overt, the hidden as well as the official.
War Artists is a group of 12 portrait drawings. From Laura Knight to
Tsuguharu Foujita to Michael D. Fay to Steve McQueen the images span
the Second World War and the Iraq war. These small drawings pose deep
and complex questions about the agendas and possibilities of art and
how
it might represent the worlds around us, about the relationship between
representation and power.
Suzanne Treister has exhibited widely:
2008: Alchemy, P.P.O.W., New York;
Alma Enterprises, London;
Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany;
2007: Skolská 28, Prague; Künstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin; New Art
Gallery, Walsall; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Tate Britain; Basekamp,
Philadelphia; HEXEN2039 in London at CHELSEA space, Warburg Institute,
Ognisko Polskie, Science Museum, British Museum, Dana Centre.
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