Cally Spooner, DRAG DRAG SOLO

Solo exhibition
Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva
March 02 — April 18 2018

A proposal by Andrea Bellini

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present DRAG DRAG SOLO, the largest solo show by Cally Spooner to date, sitting somewhere between a retrospective and a rehearsal. This project brings together three distinct bodies of work on separate floors of the institution. The first is in the past, as a closure; the second remains in the present, in formation; the third is in the future, as a speculative event. The exhibition arrives at a moment when reality can feel degraded. Here, Spooner considers how subjectivity and its bodies are shaped by technological and performative conditions, as well as how and where language undergoes damage.

Beginning from the position of a writer, Spooner considers her work equally to be that of a choreographer: arranging language across a page, then through a space, placing writing in a moving performer’s body. Evolving over long periods of time and across a variety of venues, her works are carried by casts, text and objects, which embed in the living and mediated fabric of her practice. Reflecting on the erosion of voice and language in neoliberal and technological milieus, her absurdist scripts, fictions, films and events render the behavior of invisible violence in the digital age. Comedic and dystopian replays of political, economic and media rhetoric become critiques of corporate performance and chrono-normative history alike. Considering these as corrosive to both life and utterance, she responds by presenting rehearsals and duration as a mode of resistance.

The exhibition is made in partnership with the Swiss Institute, New York, where it will manifest in a new constellation in December 2018. A new publication by The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Mousse Publishing, containing scripts, scores and drawings from And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013-2015) will be published during the exhibition. A comprehensive monograph on Spooner’s work to date is currently being organized by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in partnership with Vleeshal, Middelburg and The Madre—museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, due for release in late 2018.

Cally Spooner’s recent solo exhibitions include the Whitechapel Gallery, London; The New Museum, New York and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (in 2016), Vleeshal, Middleburg (2015). She is author of Collapsing In Parts (Mousse, 2013) and Scripts (Slimvolume, 2016).