Configuring the Potential

Engaging alternative readings of Merlin James’ work, artist & writer Lisa Skuret and musical collective Automatic Writing Circle (AWC) will respond to the themes of memory, tradition and structure in the show. Skuret activates the exhibition space through Live Diagramming (2012- ), a participatory performance concerned with reconfiguring how one reads and writes both the text accompanying an exhibition, and the experience of work within a particular setting.

Following this will be AWC’s site-located audio response, developed in collaboration with Skuret. AWC’s contribution emerges as an improvised score, which includes a sonic over-layering of Skuret’s performance with previous recordings taken in the premises of Parasol unit. This event is curated by London-based independent curators Louise O’Kelly and Fatos Ustek.

Lisa Skuret‘s practice explores interdisciplinary and micropolitical strategies. Fiction writing – including sound, voice, and movement, is a component of both her live and installed work in which she creates performative responses to exhibitions, artworks, and everyday spaces. Skuret works both independently and collectively with international art research groups such as Vision Forum (Linköpings University, Sweden). Recent exhibitions and live events have taken place at a Swedenborgian Church, London; Museum of Work, Norrkoping; Spike Island, Bristol; and David Roberts Art Foundation, London. http://www.lisaskuret.com

Automatic Writing Circle is composed of Seth Ayyaz, Peter Coyte, Thomas Gardner and Stephen Preston, all of diverse musical backgrounds which include historically informed performance, noise musics, electroacoustic composition, experimental and popular music forms. The varied instruments being performed include the Ney, the Baroque Flute, the Cello and the Daf, each of which have rich cultural histories, reconfigured through the mediation of a shadow-based instrument. http://automaticwritingcircle.org.uk

Louise O’Kelly is an independent curator and arts professional based in London. Her curatorial practice focusses on performance and the live, manifesting mostly as one-off multidisciplinary events in collaborative partnerships. The notions of pscho-geography as well as historical and cultural memory is of particular interest, with an emphasis on relationality. O’Kelly is currently a postgraduate student at MA Contemporary Art Theory, Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, London. Fatos Ustek is an independent curator and art critic, based in London. Her curatorial practice is concept-driven, where she initiates thematic investigations on ‘now’, ‘time-presence’, ‘agency-subject’, and ‘encounter-event’. Her projects emerge as collaborative endeavours with artists, writers and curators; operating internationally. Ustek’s writerly practice oscillates between forms of art criticism and art writing.

Image: Courtesy of AWC