ARTISTS TALKING

Kettle’s Yard
5 March – 1 May

A rhizome, as commented and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, is a structure that resembles a map with multiple entryways. A map made from lines that connect any point to any other point, with no beginning or end, but always with a middle from which it grows. Put in a very simple way, a rhizome is consequently an assemblage of multiplicities connected between them.

The Kettle’s Yard exhibition ‘The World, Abridged’ comprises the work of five British artists: Oliver Bancroft, Mark Edwards, Ryan Gander, Sally Osborn and Lucy Skaer. Clearly all the artists are using, as the source of their inspiration and creation, the ‘world’; that is, nature, history, people, places and objects. All of those things that are part of our lives or just constitute our lives. Nevertheless, they seem not to create a definitive and common discourse, but a work that is open to multiple interpretations, thus inviting us, the viewer, to make a sense of it. Installed into a space that allows the viewer to enter from various locations, as an ensemble the artworks resemble a rhizomatic map. Although they seem to function individually, they start to connect timidly with each other, thus allowing a multiplicity of meanings.

Ryan Gander’s photographs of ephemera (newspaper articles, drawings, album covers and other miscellaneous documents), pinned on a wall with no apparent order, seem to fit perfectly into the rhizome discourse. As Elisabeth Fisher, curator of the exhibition successfully puts it: “Following the branching patterns of thought, Gander makes work that explores the world at hand, moving from one thing (a newspaper article about a murder) to another (a photographic test card) by finding and making connections.” Loose associations is a booklet of similar nature made by Gander. Here it is he, rather than the viewer, who through the written text, processes and interconnects the various images.

Christel Tsilibaris

Christel Tsilibaris, is an independent curator based in London.