For the summer of 2018, Sadie Coles HQ is presenting an installation of two works by Uri Aran in the gallery’s Shop space on Kingly Street. Dating from different moments in the artist’s career, these highlight his sustained and far-reaching interest in the concept of genre. In distinct ways, the two works examine the codes or formulae (from visual cues to phases of music) through which meaning and affect are generated. In both cases, precise formal language belies a shifting array of meanings, through which Aran hints at the subliminal or inexpressible reaches of memory and nostalgia.
Tune for Lunch (2016) is an installation of 205 flat, blade-like pieces of bronze, arranged in a broken line around three walls in the style of an abstract frieze or cornice. The bronze pieces are curved at their top edges, with their lower portions tapering into narrow slivers of metal so as to resemble elongated apostrophes. Like a string of code, the repeating shapes fall into discrete groups. At first appearance they suggest an underlying pattern, akin to the echoing and cumulative phases of a musical score – a resemblance that is also acknowledged by the work’s title. But ultimately, the chain seems to be marked as much by variation as repetition: no two ‘sequences’ are identical, despite their surface resemblances, and no two bronze pieces are exactly alike. The bronze cyphers evoke an illegible script – fascinating for its formal rhythms and characters, over and above its given content. Indeed, the absence of a ‘contained’ message is itself generative of meaning – recalling examples of ancient inscriptions whose aura resides in their very indecipherability, and affirming Roland Barthes’s dictum that “a letter, at the same time, means and means nothing.” Meaning is suspended – made abstract and mercurial – in a way that belies the orderly, codified appearance of the metal shapes.
In the video Nocturne (2007), a flickering view of a computer screen is accompanied by the soundtrack of a nocturne for piano by Grieg. The projection shows a short repeating sequence (or GIF) from a spam email: a generic corporate logo, formed out of blue circles, bounces onto the screen and then shrinks, spins, and scatters into four parts, before joining into its original form. In the midst of this animated ‘dance’, two corporate headshots – photographs of smiling professionals – slide on and off the screen. There is a knowing and overt disconnect between the banality of the digital advert and the languid, emotive music that accompanies it. And yet the animated clip – excised from its primary context (we no longer know who the smiling faces are, or what the logo signifies) also acquires an incongruous gravitas. Shifting in tempo and swelling in mood, Grieg’s music imbues the cyclical movements of the logo and the photographs with their own strange power and logic. Formally, the work is close to structuralist films of the 1970s, in which the materiality of the medium was accentuated through handmade acts of collage or alterations to the physical film reel. Aran ironically projects this handmade aesthetic into the digital sphere: the GIF comes to resemble a stop-motion animation of physical, cut-out parts. Extending this process, he converted the video in 2017 to 16mm format. The strange montage of Grieg and email spam is interwoven, in this way, with the nostalgic associations of early animated graphics and celluloid film.
Uri Aran (b. 1977, Jerusalem) lives and works in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 2007, and has since exhibited internationally, with solo presentations including Uri Aran: Time for an Early Mark, curated by Moritz Wesseler as part of ‘curated by vienna 2017’, Christine König Galerie, Vienna; Two Things About Suffering, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2016); Mice, Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2016); Puddles, Peep-Hole, Milan (2014); Five Minutes Before, South London Gallery (2013); and here, here and here, Kunsthalle Zürich (2013). He has been included in group exhibitions including 99 Cents or Less, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, USA (2017); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2016); Take Me (I'm Yours), Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); do it,various international venues (2013-15); Liverpool Biennial 2014; the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).