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The second installment of Island takes place online and onsite at Auckland University's project space Window, and at Roman Mitch's studio in Malmo, Sweden.
The most noticeable update to this new version of Island by artists Susie Thomas(Auckland) and Roman Mitch(Sweden) is the addition of the online space, where updates of emails and documents sent between the artist are posted for the duration of the show.
Island as you may recall takes the form of intercontinental exchanges and interventions, utilising all forms of communication technologies in order to invoke open-ended investigations into it's own supports and methodologies. Island in this sense is an inquiry into the nature of it's own discursive field, through simultaneity repetition and the frenetic production of editions.
So, in what shape and form does the project unfold this time?
Widow provides a natural framing to Mitch's Treaty of Waitangi pieces and Thomas' A3, A4, and A5 wall mounted documents, as an encasement or large light box, (mimicked in an intriguingly haphazard way by Mitch in Sweden).
Thomas working with what she describes as an "extended thought process" leads me to consider these works as part of her ongoing investigation into the contingencies of language as both form and idea. Mitch's largely process based approach to art making startles me with his interjection of a large pile of photocopied images of the treaty of Waitangi.
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However to fully realise the implications of this new work, I need to trace back to the initial Auckland/Malmo production of Island at Auckland's Room 103. Here exchanges and alterations between Mitch and Thomas have produced a medley of objects ranging from algorithms and default functions of the printer to copyright license agreements, digital projections and light boxes.
In the final act Thomas exhibits four A4 sheets of paper that re-contextualise a small amount of data from her projection (a conversation between two groups of mycroplasma bacteria). Individual print outs re-invent the bacteria's dialogue and they end the show by suggesting Thomas' desire to somehow 'speak bacteria'.
In the new version of Island, she has singled out this sensibility of single sentences rendered in 'bacteria speak', and re-invents the code or translation of bacteria language into what seems to be entire conversations, poems, instructions and other considered pieces of text (largely left to our imagination).
The overall impression when closely examining these individual lines of code which Thomas has deliberately repeated over and over, is of an attempt to model bacterial communication on a human based system of language. Reminiscent of some kind of anthropocentric desire to create a complete new lexicon of meaning. Thomas' work however, is unavoidably a human translation of 'bacteria speak' viewed by us as computer code, and it is this language as material that comprises the wall display.
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Over the course of the show, a pile of over five hundred new A4 'Bacteria Speak' pieces accumulate on the floor beneath the wall based work, amplifying the feeling of alienation naturally experienced by her audience.
Mitch on the other hand does not alter his installation for the duration of the show at Window, however conducts a performance on opening night involving participants signing 'Roman Mitch' to his photocopied images of the treaty of Waitangi. Abandoning his predominantly surface based practice for a content charged topic, he experiments with the language and translation of his entire practice.
Both artists share this interpretive approach to language, Thomas noticeably exploring and re-exploring language materially and perceptually and Mitch acting as a signifier within his own practice. Island however as an exhibition form, seems to require the viewer to be fluent in not just the language of the work, but the history of the exhibition itself. It is this challenge I enjoy the most. Island may fashion itself on ideas of mass production by the frenetic creation of editions, but, evidently, Island is a different type of commodity.
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