Curatorial Statement
ONCE MORE WITH FEELING
Once More With Feeling explores the desire to repeat and remake. Playing between past and present, it evokes circuits of renewal as well as movements of revolt. Many works in this exhibition literally revolve, enacting loops of repetition and feedback, haunting and hallucination.
Many of these works are based in music and sound. With its power to unleash the energies of the crowd, the voice is a threshold between the social and the individual. Listening to a song, we find it hard not to sing along, drawing the tune into our bodies and making it our own.
Some artworks play on the durational aspect of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, citing its 12 hour structure and pointing to the struggle against time that it stages. Other works create a sense of time ‘outside’ time, of communal experience and sensory exhilaration.
Finding poetry in the everyday, artists transform an office façade into a stage for vertiginous dance, and photocopiers into disco lights. They also embrace the potential of mistakes to rupture familiar formats and to create new forms.
As we approach the Mayan prophesied ‘end of days’ on December 21, 2012, the exhibition contrasts scenes of doomsday panic and destruction with cycles of regeneration.
— Helena Reckitt
To encourage involvement by a wide range of artists – established and emerging – each exhibition includes projects selected by the curators through an open call process.
Curator Biography
Helena Reckitt is an independent curator and critic based in London, UK. Formerly Senior Curator of Programs at the Power Plant Toronto, she has held curatorial and programming positions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and was an associate editor at Routledge publishers. Reckitt has curated and co-curated exhibitions with artists including Yael Bartana, Keren Cytter, Harrell Fletcher, Joachim Koester, Ryan Trecartin, Paul Shambroom, and Carey Young. Her group exhibitions have explored inter-species relations (‘Adaptation’, 2010), memory and re-enactment (‘Not Quite How I Remember It’, 2008), and corporate and academic behaviour (‘What Business Are You In?’, 2005). She is currently Senior Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths College, London.