Morgan Quintance / Hysteresis
June 15th 2019 – July 27th 2019
David Dale Gallery
161 Broad Street
Glasgow
161 Broad Street
Glasgow
G40 2QR
David Dale Gallery is proud to present Hysteresis, the first solo
exhibition in Scotland by artist and writer Morgan Quaintance. An installation
of three films, each work deals with how past events have impacted, or been
occluded from, the UK’s artistic and socio-cultural present. From art world
debates of the 1990s to experimental music and developments in a British
postwar family’s life, the trilogy’s ostensibly disparate subject matter is
unified through a shared commitment to progressive thought and action.
The trilogy consists of Another Decade (2018), a film foregrounding the distance between academic art world
debates of the 1990s and the dynamic vitality of cultural and political life
outside institutions in the UK’s capital; Anne, Richard and Paul (2018), a portrait of
the experimental music of Bow Gamelan Ensemble, an artist group who made music
from the matter of pre-gentrified East London, commissioned by Live Art
Development Agency (LADA); and Early Years (2019), an account of one woman’s first generation diasporic experience
in Britain newly commissioned by KARST, Plymouth.
What is the meaning behind the title of the
exhibition, Hysteresis?
MQ So the title of the exhibition is a term from physics. Because my
understanding of physics is (to put it mildly) really limited I struggle to
explain it, but it’s basically the name for a material condition: the time lag
between a thing returning to its original form after that original form has
been altered by an applied force (for example, the time it takes for plastic to
go back to normal once you bend it). It’s important to say though, that the
title isn’t a concept the exhibition has been made to illustrate. It’s just a
word and meaning that I found interesting after I’d put it together.
I suppose in thinking about the past and present, and the effect my
films and the exhibition might have on people after they’d been to see it, the
word had some allure too. I also like the way the definition isn’t widely known
and so it should maybe have different initial associative results for different
people. Lastly, and probably most crucially, I was interested in a word that
wasn’t ‘trauma’, but still referenced how past events could effect the
present.
Why are the films presented as a trilogy? What is the
significance of the trilogy as a format?
MQ The three films that make up the trilogy weren’t really conceived as
that before the fact. So I didn’t start with the idea to make a trilogy and
then scout for content that would work in that mode. It really all started when
I made Another Decade in 2018. I’d been
interested in thinking about institutional amnesia (the fact that people in the
UK art world are being made to perform the same type of ‘critical engagement’
that already took place in the 1980s and ‘90s) for a while, and also thinking
about the wider disappearance of independent means of producing, disseminating
and discussing cultural production too.
So the general idea of looking at historical states of affairs that
would have impacted our present, if they weren’t left out of general accounts
of socio-cultural and political history, was there. Then I was commissioned by
the Live Art Development Agency to make a film, and I chose to focus on the
group Bow Gamelan Ensemble, and finally this year I made Early Years. Both of those films
also focused on, I suppose, personal and collective creativity as a liberatory
possibility, and how those approaches played out in the second half of the
twentieth century.
So, the format isn’t significant in and of itself, ‘trilogy’ is used
more as an easy linguistic device to communicate three things that are in
sympathy with and related to one another. In the case of the films this
relationship is thematic, loosely dealing with the past and attempting to bring
it back into some kind of antagonistic relationship to the present (in the
minds of the viewers at least), and formal, all the films are in 4:3 and are
made using a mixture of archival footage, and new 16mm and DV film shot by
myself.
The wall-based works and interview are related to a
new film currently in production titled Batakhalou Dakar, why did you decide to visit Dakar, how did this
project come about and where is it at now?
MQ I’ve been interested in looking at how cities across the world are
functioning since about 2014. Despite the internet I feel that our exposure to
the rest of the world (in the UK) is limited (intentionally) to North America
and bits of Europe (although that’s extremely limited too), and so I’ve wanted
to gain a greater understanding of how the flows of contemporaneity are moving,
so to speak, in different cities. I try to make a documentary each time I visit
somewhere, and I try to do this once a year. This is off course dependent on
what funding is available to take me to a place. Luckily because I self shoot,
and have my own equipment, I can work on a small budget like £2,500 which pays
(at a squeeze) for travel, vaccinations, visas, accommodation, food,
translation while I’m there for anywhere from two weeks to two months, and then
translation when I get back home.
I came across a fund from the British Council that focused on Sub
Saharan Africa and so I applied and managed to get it. My personal choice was
between Dakar or Addis Ababa. As I’d just been on my honeymoon to Ethiopia
though, and Addis seemed like it’d be a really tough city to navigate on my
own, I decided to go for Dakar instead. I thought I’d be able to rely on people
I knew in London who had worked on the biennial over there, but oddly everyone
seemed to be super flakey. There’s not space to go into why I think that is
here, but safe to say I think there’s a kind of institutional conservatism that
needs checking over there, or at least a bit of critical pushback. I wonder if
people here, who had overlooked those conditions, were nervous that I’d find
that out.
What is the significance of the defaced poster of
Emmanuel Macron and Macky Sall?
So the defaced image of French and Senegalese presidents Emmanuel Macron
and Macky Sall, is basically me borrowing an act of vandalism I saw in Dakar. I
was in town a few weeks after election and there were still loads of roadside
election billboards up. All across the city you could see that people had
thrown paint over them to cover the images. I started to appreciate them for
the formal qualities. They really looked like experiments in gestural
abstraction.
Now, I’m not sure the exact reason for the thrown paint. The foreigners
instinct is to cry vandalism, but it might have been something less sensational,
and more to do with a standard procedure for obsolete billboards once official
rental time runs out. Nobody seemed to know. So I suppose what I’ve done is use
it as a way to underscore (in an emphatic way) the critical perspective
economist Ndongo Samba Sylla has on the transnational relationship between
France and Senegal, to make a visual reference that’s easy to read at a glance.
In other words state-to-state relations between the countries are still fucking
people over, and despite everyone banging on about ‘decolonising’ everything
under the sun there’s radio silence about the exploitative conditions of the
CFA franc.
This exhibition is part of a series of three exhibitions taking place at
LUX, London (15th May – 22nd June, 2019) and KARST, Plymouth (15th April – 11th
May 2019).
Morgan Quaintance is a London based artist and writer. His moving image
work has been shown recently at, LIMA, Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Jerwood
Space, London, 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film
Festival 2018, November Film Festival, London, Palace International Film
Festival, Bristol, and Videonalle.17, Bonn.