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feAture allora & calzadilla
There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep, 2007, single-channel video with sound, 6 min 40 sec.
Photo: the artists. © the artists, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery, London
If political troubles can’t be solved by art,
it doesn’t mean that art can’t represent
the impossibility of that resolution
Allora and Calzadilla’s works address themselves to the difficulty operatic style, fragments of political speeches that, in different times
of addressing power itself; inappropriately appropriating the language and places, have defined important moments in world history. For the
of art and art performance – at times mute, at others dumb and at artists, ‘the multiple dramatic performances cumulatively are meant
still others cacophonous, bearing witness to the apparent absurdity to create a frustrated opera, an orchestra of battles, a contradictory
of political hopes in an apparently postpolitical age, and yet using commemorative subterranean theater driven by a combustion of
absurdity to refuse a political world empty of alternatives. Their new verbal explosions’. A eulogy, in musical and sculptural form, for those
film for the Istanbul Biennial, There’s More Than One Way to Skin a times when political antagonism could become decisive; a weird
Sheep (2007), follows the bicycle perambulations through Istanbul of monument to absent political energies in the present.
a Tulum player – the Tulum being one of the most ancient designs of If political troubles can’t be solved by art, it doesn’t mean that
bagpipe, common in rural Turkey – as he uses the Tulum to fill up the art can’t represent the impossibility of that resolution. Humour and
bicycle’s tyre, which, blowing back, forces shrill notes onto the Istanbul melancholy are inevitable byproducts of that impossibility. Rather
streets: those on the margins of modernity and globalisation sounding than using art merely to passively represent the taking of political
their presence. sides, Allora and Calzadilla choose to make art that dramatises, within
For the Lisson, the artists are working on perhaps their most itself, the conditions of possibility and impossibility in political reality,
ambitious sculpture-performance to date. Untitled at the time of the dynamics of what cannot change, and what might.
writing, the installation will consist of a series of large truncated forms
traversed by a series of tunnels. Within each tunnel there will be a Work by Allora & Calzadilla is on show at Lisson Gallery, London,
professional opera singer, lying horizontally within and delivering, in an from 10 October to 17 November
85 Artreview
Allora + calzadilla.indd 5 7/9/07 16:35:04
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