Taking a cross-generational view, the show will look at how the performative gesture works to activate space and objects- whether this be by its dependence on temporality and the sense of melancholy this inheres,  or by the leaving of a physical trace of a bygone event. The show will feature works by Charles Atlas, Helena Almeida, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, K8 Hardy, Alex Hubbard, DAS INSTITUT, Matt Mullican, R.H Quaytman, Josef Strau and Alex Waterman, a founding member of Plus Minus Ensemble and member of Either/Or ensemble, who specialize in avant-garde and experimental music, will be doing a live performance at the gallery on Thursday 15 April from 7pm.

Waterman will create a new script and diagrammatic of an imaginary landscape for the show at Vilma Gold. The piece, Beacons of Ancestorship, is based on the last and never published book by John Barton Wolgamot and will be delivered as a performed film script and series of drawings of the landscape. The landscape is made up of a list of names used by Wolgamot in his singular poem, In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women. The performance will then be installed as a radio play in the gallery next to the script and drawings only to be later reworked again into another film script plotting the trajectories through the garden’s 128 landscapes. The garden/landscape that Waterman is scripting has the further condition that it follows two of the statements from Alan Weiss’s ‘Manifesto for the Future of Landscape’: 7. The garden is a narrative, a transformer of narratives, and a generator of narratives; 8. The garden is a memory theater. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder.  Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and will be shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe this Autumn. His work is currently included in an exhibition at the Kadist Foundation in Paris.

Over the last forty years Helena Almeida has combined painting, photographic imagery, performance and drawing to explore intimacy, sensation and the limits of the body. Although the artist is always in front of the camera, she insists that her works are not self-portraits. Dressed in black since the early 1970s, sometimes with objects or furniture found in her studio, Almeida assumes positions that she has painstakingly choreographed. The resulting images, to which paint marks are sometimes added in bold blue or red, often depict ‘impossible’ actions – paint marks entering the mouth, the artist’s body extending beyond its limits. Through these ‘pseudo performances’, Almeida attempts to inhabit painting. Almeida refuses the question of self-portraiture as a transparent reproduction of an individual personality-  In ‘Inhabited Canvas’ (1976) she is able to simultaneously be herself, an other and neither. Akin to her use of blue or red ink, Almeida uses herself as an object, an empty, malleable vessel which is manipulated in ways that enable the artist to pursue her formal and conceptual interrogation of the image. In Almeida’s art there is neither the desire for a shared live experience nor any prejudice against the photograph as document. Rather, the private act of performance is not only given a spatio-temporal rebirth, but it is also completed in its photographic documentation and reception. The liveness of performance gives way to a new, hybrid, liveness of form: far from a still document, the spectator finds him or herself before a new visual exercise which defies any privileging of the real. Almeida is a Portugese artist based in Lisbon.

In the past Alex Hubbard’s videos have begun with private performances that are shot in a single take from above. Hubbard uses materials and actions that draw from performance art, painting, magic tricks, and cooking shows, all which are assembled, manipulated and ultimately destroyed. In a new video work, Screens for Recalling the Blackout (2009), recorded in a sizeable Brooklyn studio, Hubbard has created a changing space followed by the camera, but purposefully leaves the camera always a step behind. The action is just missed; walls shift, bricks fall, temporary walls are erected, and Plexiglas panels move in front of the camera. The circular movement of the camera dolly continually updates, obscures and eventually looses the room. Hubbard’s video establishes a strange relationship between what is being seen and what is being made. Causality becomes unclear: it sometimes appears as if the camera is determining the action. Memory becomes equally unclear: there is just enough repeat of the space to start to know where you are, but as the camera is slow the space is changed and the old tableaux forgotten by the time you return there. Alex Hubbard was born 1975 in Toledo, Oregon and lives and works in Brooklyn.

For further information or images please contact Martin Rasmussen: +44 (0)20 7729 9888 or: martin@vilmagold.com