Collective Gallery, Edinburgh
March 29-May 11
Kathryn Elkin doesn't want to say too much about 'Mutatis Mutandis',
her new video installation that forms part of Edinburgh's Collective
Gallery's Satellites programme. She doesn't want to give too much away,
the Belfast-born purveyor of performance, video and text-based work
says inbetween rummaging through the BBC archives as one of six
Scotland-based artists given access to such a treasure trove of sound
and vision with a view to creating new work from it. That Elkin has
the time to explore such a major undertaking may in part be down to the
fact that 'Mutatis Mutandis' is a stand-alone work that doesn't require
her physical presence.
“It's the first time I've really had to do a straight-forward
exhibition,” says. Elkin, who, as well as her own film and performance
work, has presented and curated her own events at CCA in Glasgow and
elsewhere. “I'm not going to do any live work, but neither is it a film
documenting a performance. Performance can be very fragile. It's all to
do with how you connect with somebody or not.”
Far from being evasive, Elkin is effusive about Mutatis Mutandis',
peppering her conversation with references that include composer Eric
Satie, novelist Philip Roth, radical psycho-analyst Theodore Reik and
recently deceased avant-garde theatre and opera composer Robert
Ashley.
“Reich wrote about female masochism,”Elkin explains, “and the
differences between male and female masochism, so in a way the film is
trying to un-binarise things we normally think of as binary. I like
awkward things. I like things that are half one way, half the other,
but it's good too to have someone put your hand behind your back and
make you do things a certain way. I suppose in that way I'm a female
masochist.”
The List, March 2014
ends
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