Skip to main content

Kathryn Elkin - Mutatis Mutandis 

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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more