Strange Encounters

Video Retracing El Alamein 2018 
In collaboration with Lele Huang and monologue of Michael Lewis

The exhibition  involves various video works that both use a night-club as a performative site. Constructed environments become psychological spaces where social interaction takes place.  Within the work Friday by Helen Anna Flanagan, the nightclub represents a hallucinatory place of the night — an internal and intoxicating space where language deteriorates and where there is a temporary demand for togetherness and forms of collectivity.

--> In the video of Sarojini Lewis, the artist sits silently in the setting of a nightclub in Edinburgh whilst a group of friends chatter around her, this relates to her ongoing practice in understanding identity and isolation and the temporality of certain constructed settings. Helen Anna Flanagan has constructed a new sculptural work made of a video projection and screen printed glass that depicts the movement of a fly on a body and the images of potatoes that are connected with British labour class. This installation is juxtaposed with Sarojini Lewis work Retracing El Alamein. The video work Sarojini involves exploration of ancestral migratory routes of her grandfather G.S. Lewis, researching his traces and his career as a British soldier who fought on the front line in Egypt. Besides this one can read the monologue of her father M.B.C. Lewis that recounts of several historic events. Having this history in mind she retraces his footsteps and the specific Battle of Rommel. Retracing is done together with Lele Huang who on the basis of her father's dairy about his father, who fought in North Korea reimagines and embodies this experience by her performance and re-enactment of symbolic plastic soldiers in the war memorial museum in El Alamein War Museum. In conversation together, we would like to expand upon the idea of a constructed space and combine the video works in the environment of Slash Gallery and Worm in Rotterdam.