courtyard

Locus/Lacuna Libretto by Nour Mobarak

16 Mar 2022

*Locus/Lacuna* Libretto, Nour Mobarak, Photograph of graphite and magnetic sound tape distilled in hydrochloric acid on raw linen, text, 2022

Locus/Lacuna by Nour Mobarak

17 Mar 2022

*Locus/Lacuna*, Nour Mobarak, microsite: 4-channel digital audio from reel-to-reel tape, hydrochloric acid, photograph of oil paint and graphite on raw linen, 2022
*SOUND ON*

Locus/Lacuna Introduction

courtyard opens with Locus/Lacuna, a new commission by Nour Mobarak.

Inspired by Francis Yates’ book ‘The Art of Memory’, Mobarak tracks the architectural site of a personal memory as an incomplete "memory palace", an ancient mnemonic device, to develop the piece. This device relies on associating information to specific physical environments. The protagonist sets out an imaginary journey over which they visit specific locations – or loci – to recall information. The locus of this memory is the red plush seat. Yet, once entering, there are lacunas- absences in the recording of memory. Each of the tracks of this four-channel sound work underwent distinct processes of degradation and manipulation.

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16 Mar 2022

On Two Japanese Nō Masks (18th Century) captioned at the Rietberg Museum as: “Deigan, Nō mask of the spirit of a middle aged woman, Japan, mid-Edo period, 18th C and Manbi, Nō mask of a beautiful young woman, Japan, mid-Edo Period, 18th C.” by Iman Issa

29 Mar 2022

I happened upon this display while visiting the Rietberg Museum in Zurich in 2018. I remember being captured by the two masks and their placement next to each other. Not having immediately read the caption, I attributed the subtle distinction between them to their being of different characters or affective states, but I would not have guessed what the caption denotes; that the distinction is of the more unsettling and shared nature of aging.
I tried to examine their features carefully, in an effort to accurately pinpoint where the distinction between them lies. The eyebrows are slightly thinner, the eyes having a fainter outline, the face a tiny bit narrower, the hair subtly rougher and closer to the skull, the color ever slightly fainter, and the shadow more pointed. But most importantly the shape of the mouth which defines the expression held by each. While the Manbi mask of the ‘beautiful young woman,’ exhibits curiosity and is essentially a ‘smiling mask ‘, the Deigan mask, qualified as belonging to the spirit of a middle aged woman, has an expression that is a mixture of awe, confusion, horror and resignation. It is an expression I recognize feeling myself, yet have no precise word for. The elusiveness of what allows both expressions to come forth is what has the most ominous effect on me. I’m further intrigued by the attribution of beauty to only the mask on the right. I would not have guessed it, nor necessarily agree with it, but I am overwhelmed by the contradictory thoughts that plague my mind as I try to make sense of it.
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On Using “I” and First-person Narration by Iman Issa with Moyra Davey

For several years now I’ve been engaged in an itinerant conversation with Moyra Davey. It began when I wrote a short paragraph on her film Les Goddesses for Artforum concerning her use of first person narration. At the time, I was thinking a great deal about what it means to use oneself as the source of one’ s work—trying to make sense of the “I” through which we choose to speak and articulate positions, sentiments, and facts. Moyra’ s film appeared to pierce through these issues head on and became a new lens through which to view the rest of her work. Her photographs, videos, and writings completed over three decades started to form a coherent whole in my mind, and I was eager to revisit her work from my newly found angle. Until now, I’d never had the chance to properly unpack these ideas. This conversation is an attempt at doing that.

Iman Issa: One of the key moments that brought me further into your work was seeing Les Goddesses in 2011, both at the Whitney Biennial and during your solo exhibition at Murray Guy. At that time, I was struggling with the use of what one might describe as the “personal voice”. I felt uncomfortable with the enormous leeway an artist can have when using such a voice. As if it gave one license to draw connections between different elements and narratives with no justification beyond the incontestable claim of subjective inclinations. At that same time, I was convinced that certain elements and topics could only be accessed with it. Seeing your work was revelatory; I felt it was using the personal voice differently. How would you describe your relationship to that voice?

Moyra Davey: Fundamentally I’m interested in storytelling, although I don’t often put it like that. Some background on Les Goddesses: I had just moved to Paris for ten months and was flooded with memories of when I lived there at the age of eighteen, and had hugely struggled with the city and the people I knew at the time. I wanted to write about what I considered “unspeakable” memories. That was the idea, the “agenda”, even though a big part of me thought it was impossible. A well-known writer, whose name escapes me, counseled that I should write from a place of the greatest discomfort. Knausgaard is able to do it via auto-fiction.

For myself, I can only imagine that via fiction—a novel, a story—genres I have never tried. Les Goddesses was an attempt to get close to painful material, and I came up with this device of linking my story to these historical, literary women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. This was something of an enabler; a way to create parallelism and give the ‘muck’ a foil.

But Borges points out that people “long for confessions”, and viewers have told me the same, that they prefer the grittier, autobiographical material in my narratives. Les Goddesses became somewhat of an idealized portrait of my family. And so in this new video that I’ve just begun to edit, tentatively titled Hemlock Forest, I’m asking what it would mean to revisit Les Goddesses, but to show us (my sisters and myself) as we are now, not via photos taken thirty-five years ago when we were in our heyday. I cite what you wrote in Artforum, about Les Goddesses having a “desperate” quality. I thought you hit the nail on the head.

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30 Mar 2022

Hemlock Forest by Μoyra Davey

31 Mar 2022

Moyra Davey, *Hemlock Forest*, HD video with sound, still, 41 min 15 sec, 2016
Co-commissioned and co-produced by Bergen Kunsthall & la Biennale de Montréal. Courtesy the artist & greengrassi, London
*Hemlock Forest* was presented at courtyard, Thursday 31 March–Sunday 3 April 2022, 7pm (CET)

Haris Epaminonda, Lyrical apparitions that commune with the past by Dominic Eichler

16 May 2022

Haris Epaminonda, *Tarahi V*, still, video PAL 4:3, video, sound, 3.10 min, 2007
The ghostly folds of a curtain, a couple strolling backwards on a sun-dappled path, the limpid eyes of a disconsolate diva: these are just some of the suspended moments captured in the video works of Haris Epaminonda. In the last few years, the artist has produced a series of radiant, emotional, audio-visual vignettes, which are long enough to soak into the viewer’s consciousness yet short enough to assume the qualities of a vision: they come and go fleetingly, but linger in the head like an afterimage. Reality is kept at arm’s length, its absence not particularly noticed, while the present is lost in a fictionalized past.
Most of Epaminonda’s recent video works are based on re-shot excerpts of film and television footage – principally the Greek soap operas and kitsch romantic films from the 1960s that used to fill up Sunday afternoons in the artist’s Cypriot childhood – which she then subtly reworks. Sometimes local celebrities appear in her films, but, in contrast to the early works of Francesco Vezzoli or T.J. Wilcox, they don’t do so in order to emphasize a phantasmal communion with their constructed identities. The scenes that she chooses to work with are not instantly recognizable from the original narrative, so the culled images are effectively stripped of their initial meaning and context. These out-takes are then edited and adapted in a variety of ways: the film’s speed and direction are changed, sections are distorted, its colour is intensified, or a poignant soundtrack, such as a piano composition by Alexander Scriabin, is added. Most significantly, she also superimposes footage to make surreal composites: an indoor scene, say, might also have traces of fireworks glimmering through it. While these are all common manipulation techniques of digital video, Epaminonda uses them with captivating sensibility. In *Tarahi V* (Turmoil V, 2007), for example, in a scene that recalls elements of the work of both René Magritte and Alfred Hitchcock, we see the back of a well-dressed, motionless couple staring out into a blue sky where a pair of coffee cup-ring shaped clouds appear.
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Tarahi by Haris Epaminonda

13 May 2022

The *Tarahi* series was presented at courtyard, 15 May–15 June 2022
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Erase by Eftihis Patsourakis

2 May 2022

Eftihis Patsourakis, Erase (Curtain), Oil on found photograph, 22 x 20.5 cm, 2009
For *Erase*, the artist collects found photographs, usually depicting family or other scenes from Greece in the 1970s and 1980s, and carefully paints on top of them with oil paint. It is often hard to distinguish what parts of the photograph are painted and what are remnants of the original image. The act of painting becomes an act of erasure. *Erase* is a contemplation on the concept of memory and the tremor of its loss for the artist. The representation of someone’s memory is manipulated by someone else to become something new.
Patsourakis worked on this series from 2007 – 2009, and it was the first time he painted on found photographs. He has since explored this method in diverse ways.
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Yannis Maniatakos: The Sea Said Yes by Chus Martinez

00:00

23 Jul 2022

I have been fantasizing with the idea of conceiving the Ocean as a public space and an art space. But I never dreamt that someone performed this dream already. There is a movie of the Greek artist Yannis Maniatakos painting under water that fills the viewer with lots of emotions. When you belong to a coastal community, and such is my case, you grow up with a culture of salt. Salt is both a powerful preserver and assures you food for the winters and a strong corrosive agent that acts against all the materials you use for shelter. In that regard, painting under water embodies not only an embrace of a space of light, life and liquid but a philosophy of mingled bodies and substances that goes far beyond the human. True! We never were bold enough to ask salt if she would like to be part of painting! By painting inside the Ocean, in a spot where light gets through its surface as if it was marvelous glass turning everything light blue, embracing the painter with its liquid body, he is insisting in a new artistic epistemology, one that departs from mingled bodies. A true non-binary exercise that tries—hard and repeatedly— to depict the sea from inside.

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Penny drop – A recorded conversation between artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Reba Maybury on the home vs owner series

Temporary Interference – A recorded conversation between fashion designer Hussein Chalayan and professor Judith Clark

Del Piturar a Tempera by Luigi Zuccheri

6 Jul 2024

I had known Luigi Zuccheri for many years, and I was saddened by his untimely passing. I always thought highly of Zuccheri as a painter, and I thought highly of him, too, for his impassioned pursuit of all the secrets of tempera painting, which is the origin of all painting. On this particular painting technique, he also wrote a very intelligent and thorough treatise, which I still treasure. He understood that the freshness and the transparency of certain tones and of certain sweeps of colors can be obtained only with tempera painting, and for this reason he dedicated his fruitful life as an artist to the study of that technique. I’d often see him in Venice, during my stays in that city, and I spent long hours in his studio talking to him about all the advantages and the secrets of tempera painting. He would tell me about his recipes and, in my presence, mix colors with egg yolk, gum, and other ingredients that he was gradually testing and perfecting. Out of this continuous study and this continuous pursuit were born all of those fresh and lively creations which one can admire in the numerous works that make up his oeuvre, in which appear luminous skies with far-off horizons, blooming fields with trees and plants, butterflies and all kinds of polychrome birds, and reptiles and animals too. In a little volume, which is a cherished possession of mine, one can admire all of these luminous creations of Luigi Zuccheri. I am sure that with the passing of time, Zuccheri will become increasingly understood and admired.
Giorgio de Chirico, 1974
Translated from Italian by Brian Robert Μοore
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Black Hawk produced by Tasos Gkaintatzis

2025

05 Feb

Black Hawk produced by Tasos Gkaintatzis

2024

06 Jul

Del Piturar a Tempera by Luigi Zuccheri

2023

20 Feb

Temporary Interference – A recorded conversation between fashion designer Hussein Chalayan and professor Judith Clark

2022

12 Oct

Penny drop – A recorded conversation between artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Reba Maybury on the home vs owner series

23 Jul

Yannis Maniatakos: The Sea Said Yes by Chus Martinez

16 May

Haris Epaminonda, Lyrical apparitions that commune with the past by Dominic Eichler

13 May

Tarahi by Haris Epaminonda

02 May

Erase by Eftihis Patsourakis

31 Mar

Hemlock Forest by Μoyra Davey

30 Mar

On Using “I” and First-person Narration by Iman Issa with Moyra Davey

29 Mar

17 Mar

Locus/Lacuna by Nour Mobarak

16 Mar

Locus/Lacuna Libretto by Nour Mobarak

16 Mar

Locus/Lacuna Introduction

courtyard is an exhibition space.
A place of gathering and experimentation, defined by the projects, contributions and events it hosts at a given moment, and driven by the associations that emerge from these. Visitors are invited to wander across the open space.

info@courtyard.space

Curated by:
Panos Fourtoulakis

Design and development:
Ghazaal Vojdani and Julia Novitch