It is with great pleasure that Ringsted Galleriet welcomes you to the last solo exhibition in the ‘X’ program with the renowned, avant-garde artist, Rose English (b.1950, GB). Based on conceptual art and dance, English emerged on the feminist art scene in the 1970s. With the title ‘The Surface That Has To Be There For The Shadow To Reveal Itself’ she brings into the light a phrase from the performance ‘The Double Wedding’ (1991). For Ringsted Galleriet, English is for the first time creating a new interpretation of ‘The Double Wedding’ in interaction with a significant element from the feature film ‘The Gold Diggers’ from 1983, made in collaboration with Sally Potter. We are very proud to be able to bring these two, ground-breaking works back into the limelight in Ringsted.

ARTIST STATEMENT by Rose English

As an artist I have worked in sculpture, installation, performance and film. In many cases I have reflected on the power of one artistic form through the constraints of an adjacent, related form.  These reflections, evolving over many years, also have memory – and are memories. How do multiple temporalities fold into and out of different forms?  

This immersive installation created for Ringsted Galleriet explores two earlier stage and screen works of mine in direct relation to each other, conceptually rekindling the ideas and the practice that produced them.  It is an elegiac meditation not only on my continued interest in the complexity of the two great, inter-related forms of theatre and cinema, but also on my own interdisciplinary histories. The installation brings into dialogue two works, one for stage and one for cinema.  

My work ‘The Double Wedding’ (1991) is a performance about the conventions of theatrical and cinematic representation, created for a proscenium arch stage and investigating the mechanics, epistemics and psychic phenomena of both forms.  In it, artforms both discover and fall in love with one another.  All the characters in the performance are witness to and attest to very different memories and experiences of the very work they are in – some know it as a film, as a play, as a ballet. 

‘The Double Wedding’ was a work in itself, and in it I also further developed the artistic preoccupations I shared and explored with collaborators on a film that was made almost a decade before it.  ‘The Gold Diggers’ (1983: Rose English, Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter) addressed capitalism, film convention, and feminist representational experimentation, among others. A pivotal moment in ‘The Gold Diggers’ is the ‘rehearsal scene’, in which a dancer and an actress prepare to perform, a vast special effects mirror mediating their presence. They are both on stage and off, in a theatre and on a screen.

In this installation, there is only a thin membrane between these two early works, vertiginous and evanescent. A ‘silver screen’ shows a projection of a performance, a theatre work captured on early video. Behind it, floating in space, is an image of a mirror at an angled tangent, and an actor: a two-dimensional photograph that brings us abruptly into the backstage. Not the backstage of the projected performance, but rather the backstage of another theatre, a theatre that had become a film set. In the liminal space between these two surfaces – the screen and the photograph – there shimmers my own embodied memory of the one work in the other, the one form in the other.

WELCOME to the grand opening of the exhibition ‘The Surface That Has To Be There For The Shadow To Reveal Itself’ on Saturday October 26th from 1-4pm with an artist talk followed by tapas and drinks for everybody.

Also, mark your calendars for the finissage on Saturday December 7th at 1-4pm, where Rose English will present the feature film ‘The Gold Diggers’ followed by Q&A with art historian, Stine Hebert at KINO Kultur Ringsted. More information will follow.