FTHo

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Performances with Emmy Beber:

Sunday 8th October at 3pm and 5pm & Saturday 4th November at 3pm and 5pm

Performances are free or pay what you like. For tickets please click here.

Artist's Talk

Thursday 2nd November 7-8pm

Lina Hermsdorf in Conversation with FTHo Curator/Director Gareth Bell-Jones.

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, installation view, Flat Time House. Photography: Jean-Philippe Woodland

In State 0, Hermsdorf continues her exploration of how power structures, technology and biological structures interact with one another. Her essayistic work regularly incorporates the biographical data from her performers, exploring human time-lines and the fragility of technologically infiltrated organisms. Having worked in the field of theatre prior to the visual arts, Hermsdorf’s practice uses cross-disciplinary techniques. Performer Emmy Beber’s life is told alternately by a male and female voice. Her narratives employ textual and spatial arrangements to convey an image of an unstable, split body where the natural and virtual are interchangeable.

By spending an extended period researching at Flat Time House, she integrates aspects of the ‘Living Sculpture’ into the work playing with FTHo’s duel function as a domestic and institutional space. The selection of works by Latham usually presented in the ‘Mind’ gallery have been taken down but have been replaced by the physical presence of John Latham himself, through the X-ray prints of from his 1970 placement at Clare Hall Hospital. The installation sits between the visible and the inner the stage and the real, the outward and inward view.

Hermsdorf’s exhibitions develop sequentially as parts of a larger whole and State 0 forms the second episode of the work Vantage Point exhibited at Künstlerhaus Bremen earlier in 2017 in partnership with FTHo. In this companion exhibition, she continues her exploration of how technology produces and affects our physical reality and the sense for the self. The work looks at the transformation of the body through training, exercise, medicine, science, and ultimately by the search for immortality. As an accretive and evolving project, the show acquires aspects of John Latham’s thinking and terminology. In his cosmology Latham used the term State 0 to refer to nothing, using glass as a means to express this in his artwork.

In the last few years I’ve used glass to represent nothing, and it is an appropriate material to do this. It’s very hard, you can see through it, so it’s not an object. In photographs it’s difficult to puzzle that there’s anything there at all. But when you place a book through it, that is by contrast, very much like the extended world, like a person with a whole history that goes down a line.

John Latham, June 1991. From an interview with Nicholas Wegner and Sarah Batiste.

 A text by writer Dean Kissick accompanies the exhibition.

Lina Hermsdorf will be in Conversation with FTHo Curator/Director Gareth Bell-Jones on Thursday 2nd November from 7-8pm

REVIEWS

Click here for the exhibition review in Artworks London

Lina Hermsdorf - 'As If Sand Had Been Sprinkled Into Them', Installation view, 2016. Salon Kennedy, Frankfurt. Courtesy the artist.

Lina Hermsdorf studied Theatre at the University in Giessen and Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her performative works and installations have been shown at Künstlerhaus Bremen (2017), Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach (2016), Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2016), BlockUniverse, London (2016), Yvonne Lambert, Berlin (2015), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2015), Rowing, London (2015), and Seiras, Max Mayer (2015) among other venues. Upcoming shows include: Kunstverein Freiburg (2017) and Mother’s Tongue And Father’s Mouth, unttld contemporary, Vienna (2017).

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Emmy Beber is a writer, editor and teacher based in London. Her first book, The Bodies that Remain is coming out with punctum books in late 2017

Dean Kissick lives in New York, has a monthly column for Spike titled The Downward Spiral, and is busy writing the Great American Art Novel

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, installation view, Flat Time House. Photography: Jean-Philippe Woodland

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Jean-Philippe Woodland

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran

Lina Hermsdorf, 'Vantage Point, State 0', 2017, documentation of performance Flat Time House, performer: Emmy Beber. Photography: Andrew Magurran