‘A History of Irritated Material’ will include the work of artists, archives and collectives, amongst them Group Material, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Sture Johannesson, Ad Reinhardt, Disobedience, an ongoing video archive, and Lygia Clark, from Object to Event, produced by Suely Rolnik.
This exhibition samples art's relation to politics, alienation and the archive, using examples from each decade since the Second World War. It brings together some significant work never seen in the UK. The archive of the New York collective Group Material has been made available for the very first time to record four of their radical exhibitions from the eighties and early nineties. Sture Johannesson's Cannabis Gallery from Malmö in the sixties will be revived and the exhibition will also include two installations by Inspection Medical Hermeneutics (a collective from Moscow of the 'Glasnost' years), as well as Disobedience, an ongoing archive of activist films, and both the abstract and graphic political work of Ad Reinhardt. Significantly, Raven Row has commissioned the translation of Suely Rolnik's compendious research into Lygia Clark's otherwise invisible project Structuring the Self (1977–87) – the culmination of Clark’s life-art – and sections of this important video archive will be shown for the first time in English.
Usually an archive draws its value from being placed in chronological relation with a past event. What, then, characterises these archives, with their unruly documents which are more concerned with activation in the present? The positions in this exhibition are borderline or subterranean, sitting at the edge of art history, or at the boundary of art proper. Alienation – a Marxian term which has fallen out of use – is a reference point for the exhibition, both as a pathology in the individual and a sickness in the body politic. Art that criticises and confronts problems in the social world, but is also sceptical towards itself, can appear anxious and volatile as well as critically productive.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a regular film and events programme, including a programme of discussions and screenings of political films made by British collectives in the seventies and eighties.
The exhibition is designed by John Morgan studio, Gorka Eizagirre and Xabier Salaberría, and curated by Lars Bang Larsen, with Petra Bauer, Dan Kidner, Alex Sainsbury, and Marco Scotini.