Caecilia Tripp: Going Space and Other Worlding
11 September – 1 December 2019
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 11, 6 – 9 pm
Curated by Emelie Chhangur
Working at the intersection of artistic and scientific inquiry, Paris- and New York-based Caecilia Tripp creates immersive film, participatory performance, and sculptural installations that transgress fixed identities and trespass bounded geographies in the service of more ethereal and inter-connected forms expression: from the depths of earth to the interstellar beyond.
Going Space and Other Worlding was the culmination of two years of research and residencies with AGYU, bringing together recent and commissioned works that poetically engage Martiniquan poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s pensée du tremblement: a universe of thinking that trembles, shakes, vibrates, and stays multiple.
We might view Caecilia’s working practice as a form of improvised conversation—across cultures, geographies, histories, texts (including oralities), and disciplines—that result in chaos collages: a chaos-cosmos collective-collage. Their cosmogony is always in conversation with her former collaborator Édouard Glissant, her works are performative enactments of his “poetics of relation.” Caecilia is deeply engaged in these poetics as the moment of awakening of the world’s imaginary in all of us, where differences do not constitute borders but coexist as opacities in rhizomatic connectedness… in solidarity. The works are improvised at the level of her process-oriented methodology, what one might call a creolizing technique: intuitive, errant, and transversal. Tracing relational connections across sometimes disparate localities in which she works and in-between the diverse individuals and groups with whom she encounters along the way, Caecilia’s work nevertheless reflects (or perhaps refracts) what is always already operating everywhere. Because of this, connections can sometimes seem like magical coincidence. Caecilia draws upon her protagonist-collaborators’ particular histories, traditions, points of origin, and, importantly, their talents and commitments in dance, spoken-word, and music, and writing (here: Glissant, Cheikh Anta Diop, Sun Ra), while mining diverse networks of knowledge—from geology and seismology to astrophysics and string theory. Caecilia brings all these various spheres of origin and expression into one another’s orbit with magnetic attraction, or through what she calls, “dialogical imagination.”
The works gathered together in Going Space and Other Worlding operated on a variety of scales—from liquid earth to black holes to all the interstellar matter in-between—yet they were consistent in that they follow her signature [aesthetic] formula: Dv=Vd (differentiating variation = variating repetition), with a wandering and ex-centric curiosity that experimentally follows an open space of possibility, exponentially.
Caecilia Tripp’s work has been shown in galleries, museums, and public streets internationally: PS1/MOMA New York; Museum of Modern Art, Paris; Center of Contemporary Arts, New Orleans; Clark House Initiative, Mumbai; Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, New York; Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France; featured in biennials: 7th Gwangju Biennale; 2008 Dakar Biennale; Prospect Biennale 1; Sharjah 14; and shown at film festivals: MOSTRA 61 Film Festival, Venice; Real life Film Festival, Ghana; among others. Her filmic opera, The Making of Americans (2004), won the award for best experimental film at Cinema Paradise, Hawaii.
Caecilia Tripp: Going Space and Other Worlding was curated by Emelie Chhangur and produced through an extended engagement between artist and curator over the past two years. The presentation of Asteroid (2019) at AGYU was made possible with the financial support of Sharjah Foundation and Erna Hecey Gallery, Luxembourg. Additional work by Caecilia Tripp is on view as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 259 Lake Shore Blvd. E. Visit torontobiennial.org for details. See: Interstellar Sleep.
Caecilia Tripp: Going Space and Other Worlding was presented in partnership with the Toronto branch of the Cultural and Scientific Office of the French Embassy, located at the French Consulate in Toronto. The exhibition was produced with the support of the Institut Français, Paris, France, and the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in Canada. Special thank you to Alexandra Servel, Chargée de mission Département Echanges et Coopérations artistiques, and Thiffany Fukuma, Cultural Attaché, Consulat général de France à Toronto.
Works courtesy of the artist and Erna Hecey Gallery, Luxembourg.
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