The Facts On The Ground

A solo exhibition of British artist and writer Tim Etchells, comprising a large series of new text drawings, a neon installation and performance across VITRINE’s two spaces (Bermondsey Street & Bermondsey Square). The exhibition will display the truly multifaceted nature of his practice and further expand Etchells’ explorations of the possibilities and limitations of language and the conditions of performativity and liveness.

At VITRINE Bermondsey Street, a new body of work named ‘Personal Statement’ creates a complex installation of acrylics and graphite drawings. Works of varied dimensions are hung in an unruly cluster creating an installation across the gallery.

Contrasting the singularity of Etchells’ single-phrase works in neon, LED and print media, ‘Personal Statement’ is as much about the dynamic relation between the materials used in different elements of the installation, as it is about the content of individual texts or phrases. The work creates a field or constellation of relation, in which the value and significance of statements is constantly modified and reinvented in dialogue with their context. Clearly unfinished and temporary in its manifestation as a dense cluster on a wall, ‘Personal Statement’ .

At the Private View, Etchells will present a short improvised performance under the title ‘Word File (VITRINE)’, drawing on and developing the strategies for text improvisation that he has pursued in recent years in the full length performance project ‘A Broadcast/Looping Pieces’ (2014), previously performed at David Roberts Foundation and Hayward Gallery, London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels, Hebbel Theatre, Berlin amongst other places. Addressing the text materials of the installation ‘Personal Statement’, the mesmerising ‘Word File (VITRINE)’ is, at the same time, a playful live remixing of pages from Etchells’ notebook – a computer document in which he has gathered different kinds of texts over many years. Comical, virtuosic and provocative, ‘Word File (VITRINE)’ is concerned with both the semantic aspects of spoken language and the textural and musical qualities it acquires in live performance.

VITRINE Bermondsey Square will feature the neon installation ‘Who Knows’ (2014), in which Etchells combines and re-combines the simple-but-complicated phrases ‘I Know’, ‘You Know’, ‘They Know’ and ‘We Know’, giving hallucinatory space to the contradictions and connections of their semantic and visual content.