Ludovic Duchateau. In Dreamland, 2016; installation view, A Stark Project, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Artist and A Stark Project. Photo: Hillary Goidell.

French sculptor Ludovic Duchâteau’s first solo show in the U.S., In Dreamland at Berkeley’s A Stark Project, is a polished articulation of his dystopian obsessions, which previously found homes in miniature scenes of domestic life cleverly ensconced inside otherwise ordinary-seeming briefcases and among tentacular silicon sculptures engineered with e-waste. Originally a game programmer, Duchâteau abandoned digital media at the height of the first internet bubble in favor of working with a broader variety of materials [1]. The result is particularly striking, evidenced by the ominous installation, In Dreamland.

In the life-size installation featuring epoxy resin and aluminum wire (among other materials), a boy inside a black tarp has fallen asleep reading a famous graphic novel, Akira (set in “Neo-Tokyo” in the aftermath of World War III). The science-fiction titles that are scattered around his makeshift campsite complete the post-apocalyptic literary symbolism. Next to the boy, a cryptic life form emerges from the tent, its gigantic tendrils scouting the empty terrain; this massive, encroaching root system may be a projection of the sleeping boy’s imagination, or perhaps it is all too real—a slithering alien creature seeking to occupy an already ravaged world and replace the frail remnants of a depleted humanity. Either way, viewers are confronted with a heart-stopping scene that belies the pacifying title of the work.

The nightmarish quality of the horrifying habitat is transfixing, in the subliminally deranging manner of a bad accident that is glimpsed, then gone, leaving only a sentiment of cognitive dissonance and a disquieting aftertaste. The blackened radio flyer wagon that lingers at the periphery of the installation adds to the dread. In this sprawling, lifelike piece, Duchâteau reverses the usual dynamic of his smaller, more fastidious works, in which the blissful veneer of domesticity only hints at macabre truths coursing beneath the surface. Here, the unnerving effect of a mutated appendage snaking stealthily out of the boy’s exposed redoubt is the first thing viewers see. But closer examination reveals the relaxed position of the sleeping child, and the possibility that we are, in fact, worlds removed from an apocalyptic reality, inhabiting nothing more than a sinuous, ensnaring dreamland.

Ludovic Duchâteau: In Dreamland is on view through January 15, 2017.

Noah Sudarsky is the Project Manager at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley. His art coverage has been featured in New York Press, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Whitewall Magazine of Contemporary Art, and The Onion.

[1] Conversation with the artist.

Edgar Arceneaux, A Time To Break Silence, 2013; single-channel HD video with color and sound; 65 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

While Written in Fire and Smoke includes a variety of media, the pivotal pieces in Arceneaux’s show are the two film-based works, A Time To Break Silence (2013), and Until, Until, Until… (2015). The first of these is an hour long, and presents a bizarre layering of referents. The setting of the film is an abandoned Detroit church, littered in its grand chamber with bits of itself that have fallen or been ripped off of its bones. The light filters through the church’s large leaded windows, leaving the whole building luminous but ravaged, a bit like a picked-over rib cage, with its great arching lines framing the hollowed out interior.

Though this singular setting remains consistent, Arcenaux’s film seems split into three separate temporal registers—layers of time that sometimes overlap but seem not quite to blend. The first figure to enter this solemn space is an ape-like creature (a mass of hair and set of movements that some might recognize from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) huddling and bounding close to the floor, examining bits of detritus throughout the gutted church. With wild hair obscuring its face and white powder from the church’s mangled plaster clinging to its simian hands and feet, it is hard to tell if this is a creature from the future or past. Pre-human or post-apocalyptic?

The film’s second stratum is populated by another solitary figure, though this one is more easily placed in our memory: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As the words of a speech King originally gave at Riverside Church in 1967 boom through the abandoned space, we have the sense that both King and his unseen audience are inferred but not present, psychically filling the space like apparitions. On screen, Dr. King speaks rhythmically about America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and the moral dilemma of balancing non-violence and active dissent. Portrayed by an actor filmed primarily from behind, the King character is also represented by a composite of drawings, though the voice orates on no matter the camera angle. The final layer of film is the most temporally present, but feels the most spatially detached. In the choir loft, a member of Underground Resistance, a Detroit-based techno collective, poses behind his keyboard, producing pulsing sounds that both accompany and drown out King’s words.

Edgar Arceneaux, A Time To Break Silence, 2013; single-channel HD video with color and sound; 65 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Across the hour of the film, these three registers layer together to form a bizarre composite: present-future-past; history-fantasy-reality; speech-movement-sound. All parts appear intermittently and simultaneously, and even as this composition builds up to its own fragmented whole, Arceneaux breaks his own illusion with snippets of conversation with the actors, or a glimpse of a crewmember in the space, cracking (and then quickly restoring) the film’s mesmerizing fourth wall.

Until, Until, Until… is also comprised of several layers, all of which relate back to and interpolate a singular moment in American culture. The subject of Arcenaux’s installation (which itself is an adaptation of a theatrical version of the piece commissioned by Performa 2015) is a 1981 performance by the actor Ben Vereen as part of a televised “All Star Inaugural Gala” celebrating incoming president Ronald Reagan. Vereen’s performance was meant as a tribute to the vaudeville-era performer, Bert Williams—a black man who performed in blackface. When Vereen, too, donned blackface to recreate Williams’ act (and when the network broadcasting the gala edited out the latter half of his act that meant to critique the practice), Vereen was lambasted for reinforcing racist tropes.

Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until…, 2016; HD video installation, spotlights, coat stand, makeup table, stool, clothing, hats, shoes, drop curtains, bar, monitors, book. Co-commissioned by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Performa 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

The version of Until, Until, Until… on view in the exhibition includes video footage of Vereen’s televised performance, and film of the theatrical version from 2015, with actor Frank Lawson playing Vereen. The room’s mis-en-scene includes a booth lined with empty glasses, and two colorful orbs projected on the sidewalls. In the center of the gallery, two long, parallel curtains function as diaphanous screens and create an interior chamber atop a blue spangled floor. Between the two curtains, a TV set blares a distorted picture (at times, one can make out a man dancing his way across a blue patterned stage), and behind it, a coat rack cradles bits of Vereen’s costume. Lawson-as-Vereen offers several interpretations of the 1981 performance to the (contemporary) crowd, reciting lines and imitating actions in different emotional and tonal registers. At times, his delivery seems mocking as he punches out Vereen’s words: “It’s an honor to be in your presence. You are so gracious to allow this. Really.” At other times, the delivery of these same words is gut-wrenching, as Lawson’s shining face fills the gauzy screen.

Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until…, 2016; HD video installation, spotlights, coat stand, makeup table, stool, clothing, hats, shoes, drop curtains, bar, monitors, book. Co-commissioned by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Performa 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Both visually powerful and emotionally charged, these intricate composites recreate powerful historical utterances—King’s and Vereen’s—but build up a context around them that complicates rather than clarifies the original actions. The artist does not seek to simplify that which is complex, that much is clear. In these film-based works, Arceneaux addresses American politics, race, science fiction, and collective memory as imbricated and interlocking components. By building these layers, Arceneaux’s works interrogate the way that perceptions slip and change across time, and explore an imaginary that parallels the subconscious—a space where actions play on loop (but never replicate exactly), where metaphor lives in the open, and where time is compressed into the lacuna of the present.

Edgar Arceneaux: Written in Fire and Smoke is on view through January 8, 2017.

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. In The Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2015 (film still). Courtesy of the Artists and Lawrie Shabibi.

Abdellatif R. Abdeljawad: Do you eat yourself from the finest porcelain?

Larissa Sansour: Well, I guess the whole premise of the film is that this rebel leader narrator is setting up an elaborate operation in order for the future generations of Palestinians to obtain the basic privileges that history has so far denied them; so, it is basically a revisionist historical comment. Am I eating from the finest porcelain? Right now, maybe in my mind … but not according to the rest of the world. I want the rest of the world to see me as a person who is doing so.

This work is very much about who tells history, and how much myth and fiction are really a part of writing history. If the world does not realize that we exist, we might as well just bury some porcelain DNA for future archaeologists to find, as a stick in the wheel on currently accepted versions of history. Maybe the revisions that this porcelain will cause will tilt the balance in favor of the Palestinians at some point in the future. The film is also a commentary on how Israel uses archaeology as headline news, and how it has been instrumentalized, rather than been seen as a scientific method … Israelis wants to prove something, and therefore they dig to find evidence supporting a fiction already having taken the form of fact; they use archaeology towards their own political ends, and it is becoming a means by which to prove a continued historical presence entitling them to territories currently belonging to others.

Read the full article here.