Melanie Gilligan

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Melanie Gilligan (* 1979 in Toronto , Canada ) is an artist who expresses herself in various media, such as texts, videos, installations , performances and music. Through the writings of Karl Marx , Gilligan began to deal with capitalism in 2005 . She is best known for videos and performances that critically examine politics and contemporary capitalist economics. The role of the self in society, the role of communication and emotions are repeatedly illuminated by it. Gilligan exhibits internationally. She lives and works in London and New York City .

education

Gilligan completed her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art ( BA (Hons) Fine Art ) from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 2002 . In 2004/05 she took part in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City .

Author

Critical writing is a major part of Gilligan's creative work. She has already published in well-known publications such as texts on art , Artforum , Mute Magazine (online magazine for culture and politics) and Gray Room (magazine for art history and architecture).

"The [...] protests themselves have offered another future-oriented affect: hope - the hope that fighting back is not futile."

"The [...] protests themselves offered another future-oriented effect: Hope - the hope that fighting back is not pointless."

- Melanie Gilligan : e-flux.com

In her article Affect & Exchange ( German  influence & exchange ) from 2012, Gilligan seeks to draw attention to the imbalance in the distribution of wealth fueled by governments. In the article she refers to her artistic and literary work over the past few years. Your consideration revolves around the core question of how the political and economic landscape could be changed so that the accumulation of wealth no longer determines human interactions. Gilligan describes how she approaches the question through fiction, in this specific case through her film series "The Common Sense". She leads the mass protests of the population in various countries, such as the Occupy movement . What principles and values ​​hold the international protests together?
To find out, she draws a line on human emotions. She asks what potential lies in emotions in relation to the current and future political situation. Gilligan believes that emotions are viewed as irrational in academic, political and socio-economic settings. Emotions cannot be communicated. Rational thoughts, on the other hand, reach the social world. Language is the natural medium there. As an example, she cites the rational claim that Bertolt Brecht pursued in his art. Baruch Spinoza, in turn, viewed feelings as a form of thinking and as a natural body reaction to external stimuli. In this way the subjective can open up to the world. In order to pursue this train of thought further, affect, feeling and emotion must be separated. For this path she cites Brian Massumi's point of view . The bottom line is that feelings are the only way to look at the individual's inner world.

Movies

The core theme of Gilligan's films is the role the economy has on our lives. It tells of the effects of capital in times of crisis and their consequences and aftermath. Melanie Gilligan is named in a row with Hito Steyerl and Allan Sekula . It differs in its resourceful and analytical way of implementing Marxist ideas and using them as a critique of contemporary capitalism.

The topics are illustrated using people or groups of people and their individual stories. Portraying the market as a personalized activity is perhaps Gilligan's greatest achievement. One journalist describes Gilligan's video work as "funny and knowing, often disturbing and sometimes hilarious." ( Eli Diner : Flash Art (2018) )

Gilligan also integrates sequences of her films in her exhibitions, as she did, for example, in the Popular Unrest project .

The works "Crisis in the Credit System", "Popular Unrest" and "The Common Sense" can be viewed as a trilogy . The series is a reflection of our times of crises and revolts. An image is shown in which the individual is transformed by a general identity. It thus becomes part of an organic whole. The films remain unclear as to why individual and collective life should not be compatible.

Crisis in the Credit System

After the global financial crisis of 2007, Gilligan conducted interviews in the London financial world. She held intensive discussions with hedge fund managers, financial journalists, economists , bankers and debt activists. She implemented her conclusions in the film project "Crisis in the Credit System" ( German  crisis in the credit system ). In 2008, just weeks after the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers , Gilligan released this film. He reports on the gap between the abstract financial mechanisms that led to economic collapse and the human costs that have to be paid for it. The fictional drama tells of an investment bank trying to find strategies for a way out of the financial crisis with its employees. In role-playing games, the employees seem to drive the principle of making money into the absurd.
A journalist complains that the characters use stereotypes and that the actors have difficulty reproducing the lyrics naturally about financial theories. The four-part video series was specially designed for the Internet as a medium.

Self-capital

"Self-Capital" ( German  self-capital ) is a three-part video work by 2009. It was part of the "Talk Show" at the exhibition Institute of Contemporary Arts in London designed. The film was shot entirely at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London.

In this film, the capitalism of the world economy is portrayed as a woman. The protagonist undergoes radical therapy to treat the psychological consequences of a recent breakdown. The patient represents both the economy and an individual affected by the financial crisis. The topic of the global economy is dealt with using this personal fate of a post-traumatic stress disorder. She goes through unorthodox, body-oriented techniques through which the material problems are physically felt. Worrying, current, psychological and political issues are reduced to their physicality and dealt with. All roles - patient and psychiatrist, saleswoman and buyer - are played by one and the same actress.

Popular unrest

The five-part film Popular Unrest ( German  popular unrest ) from 2010 is based on the enthusiasm for crime dramas and science fiction. The style is reminiscent of documentaries. The body horror works by David Cronenberg served as inspiration . On the other hand, the amalgamation with psychological aspects is borrowed from series such as CSI, Dexter and Bones . "[The film is inspired by American television series], in which reality is perceived through a pornographic forensics of empirical and visceral phenomena." ( Popular Unrest : popularunrest.org ) Although the film was released a year before the Occupy protests in Zuccotti Park , it is almost impossible to overlook the parallels to this movement.

In terms of content, the fear of free will and control by the government is played with. History shows the difference between human and technical interactions. The action is shaped by a global system called "The Spirit". The computer system that looks like Big Brother organizes all personal and economic interactions between people. It compares, assigns values ​​and in this way establishes a system of order - including a form of rule. Glitches in the spirit force people to act according to it, which makes them a marketplace, an economic space. Mysterious murders happen all over the world, apparently without a murderer. At the same time, people feel deeply connected by an invisible force. Scientists encourage this through experiments. Yet the protagonist would like to find their own answers. The ending is described as surprising.

The film raises the question of whether people in groups with unfamiliar, different people are more able to ward off submission than they would be in traditional family ties. The artist remains skeptical whether such real social changes can be brought about. Popular Unrest shows a world in which man is reduced to his physical characteristics and capitalistically integrated. Gilligan's protagonists always have to experience capitalist exploitation physically - psychologically, physically or through death.

The project was jointly funded by several art institutions. It was shot in London with twelve main actors. Professional actors act. The film is available as a set on the Internet. It was also exhibited in four locations in 2010, in England, Germany and Canada. Gilligan has created a separate installation for presentation for each of the exhibition locations. At the Walter Phillips Gallery (Canada), for example, it was presented in a room with five booths, one for each episode. The video was controlled by entering the booth. As a result, like the characters in the film, the visitor was treated as a unit whose outside world is controlled by an invisible hand.

In 2010, Gilligan received the Illy Present Future Award at the Artissima Art Fair in Turin for her work Popular Unrest .

The Common Sense

Published in 2014 Gilligan the movie "The Common Sense" ( German  Common sense ). It is designed in the style of a mini- series, with 15 episodes. Gilligan uses drama and fiction to address social, political and economic issues. She examines the dangers of the common and the collective. To do this, she devised a fictional technology that makes it possible to feel other people's emotions directly. The film tells the social and political effects of this technique over a period of ten years. In the capitalist world, the invention is used to control workers in a profound way. For example, a manager uses the transfer of negative energies to employees in order to increase their productivity. The film asks the viewer various questions: What would the world look like if the individual needs of the individual didn't exist? What happens in our world, in which people are mainly connected by capital, if we could share emotions directly? It could be the word common ( German  together, total, frequently ) understand the movie title in two ways, first, the community of human society, on the other hand, the whole of the equity. The viewer has to decide for himself whether these two versions can be merged again.

Installations

Gilligan's installations focus on screens that are exhibited in expansive steel tubes. The screens are part of the installation and are sometimes presented at unusual angles. The rods form geometric shapes and room divisions that have a dominant and surprising effect.

2013 presented Gilligan in the gallery Max Mayer in Dusseldorf installing 4 x exchange / abstraction ( German  4 x exchange / abstraction from). The work consisted of steel stands with four flat screens on which HD videos ran. The screens were spread across the room and alternated between real game scenes and computer animations. An action unfolded across the devices. For the visual language, Gilligan used the appearance of reality TV formats and preset effects. The images disintegrated again and again, frayed and blurred into the abstract. The themes of the videos shown are the mechanisms of the exchange of goods, the absurdity of neoliberal capitalism and the right of the stronger in subjectivism . The lack of oversubscription in this work was criticized, as can be found in the work of Simon Denny . The work creates the impression that the viewer is not allowed to decide for himself what to think of the topic. This leads to their work becoming a product of the very capitalist world that they are always criticizing.

2019 Gilligan was in a group exhibition in Basel their five-channel video installation titled "Crowds" ( German  masses ). The work shows the social injustice of capitalism using the example of a protagonist who follows Gilligan in everyday situations staged on film. The main actress is looking for a job in a city that seems to be reserved for tourism and consumption alone. The artist portrays the life situations with temporary and low-wage jobs. However, it also documents forms of self-organization and the protest of those affected against their illegality.

Exhibitions

Gilligan has had numerous group and solo exhibitions in North America, Europe and Asia since 2009. An excerpt from their exhibitions:

performance

Untitled 2011 was a performance reading performed by Gilligan on March 19, 2011, as part of Tate Modern Live: Push and Pull . The production design was a large format projection of her own earlier performance The Miner's Object (2006). Gilligan acted in front of the screen, talked about her performance at that time, stuck catchphrases on the screen, or raged ecstatically across the stage. The fictional part of the projection alternated with the factual reading. In The Miner's Object , a web of several narrative levels emerges. In Untitled 2011, Gilligan analyzed linguistic techniques and emotions that she used in The Miner's Object to achieve certain effects on the viewer. She wanted the audience to critically question communication methods. With her analytical explanations, she added another level of communication to the performance. The performance alluded to various ways of communicating and sharing knowledge. To this end, Gilligan examined, for example, the interaction of speaking, hearing and interpreting. The performance reading became the form of communication that was analyzed - and at the same time also the means by which the analysis was carried out. As part of the program, Gilligan looked at her own performances and discussed more frequent use of performance readings.

music

Gilligan makes music with duo partner Ben Seymour under the band name "Petit Mal" ( German  small shopping center; but also epilepsy ). Gilligan is a singer, Seymour plays the synthesizer .

2008 her debut single was released Crisis in the Credit System ( German  crisis in the credit system ). The musical references to the synth pop of the 80s were already made here . The music has been described as “ Chris & Cosey encounter malaria! , with texts by Robbe-Grillet ”. The bands Pet Shop Boys and Tears For Fears are cited as a further comparison . The sounds spread a melancholy mood, with an "electronic rhythm that you can snap along ". The melodies are easy to digest, whereas the lyrics are heavier. The single is the first pop song about the financial crisis and was written two years before the event. Gilligan sings the turmoil of the global economic system with great serenity, based on the prophecy of a financial apocalypse . No previous knowledge is required to understand it, according to a journalist, "but a thorough knowledge of the capitalist imperatives and socio-economic structures is recommended."
The single is used in Gilligan's film of the same name.

In 2009 Gilligan released the album of the same name under the band name "Petit Mal". The genre is industrial / wave / electro . The music is described as on the one hand caught up in the synth rock of the early 80s, but on the other hand modern and without kitsch. Some of the tracks can be assigned to the avant-garde . The style is compared to the band Telepathe . The album was released on the Difficult Fun label .

As part of her exhibition on "Popular Unrest" in Canada in 2010, Gilligan played with her band Petit Mal in the exhibiting gallery. Together as a duo with Seymour, they mixed electro-pop , synth rock and post-punk .

Awards

  • 2009 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists
  • 2010 Illy Present Future Award for her work Popular Unrest at the Artissima Art Fair, Turin

Web sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Dutch Art Institute: Melanie Gilligan. In: dutchartinstitute.eu. DAI Art Praxis c / o ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands, accessed on January 6, 2020 (English).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Daniel Urban: In the last double feature of the year on December 16, the Canadian artist Melanie Gilligan is a guest. In: schirn.de. SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT am Main GmbH, December 11, 2015, accessed on January 8, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Self-Capital - Melanie Gilligan. In: interaccess.org. InterAccess, Canada, accessed January 7, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Melanie Gilligan: Down with inflation . In: Texts on Art . No. 63 . Texts on Kunst Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, September 2006, ISSN  0940-9459 , p. 66 ( textezurkunst.de [accessed on February 13, 2020]).
  5. ↑ Search - Mute. In: metamute.org. Mute Publishing, accessed February 13, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Melanie Gilligan, Tom Holert: Subjects of Finance . In: Gray Room . No. 46 . The MIT Press, 2012, pp. 84-98 ( mitpressjournals.org [accessed February 13, 2020]).
  7. ^ Melanie Gilligan: Visits from the Future. In: e-flux.com. e-flux, January 22, 2011, accessed on February 8, 2020 .
  8. ^ Melanie Gilligan: Affect & Exchange. In: fillip.ca. Fillip - Projectile Publishing Society, 2012, accessed January 25, 2020 .
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g Melanie Gilligan The Common Sense Substitution. In: km-k.at. Kunstverein Medienturm in the "Künstlerhaus", accessed on January 6, 2020 .
  10. ^ A b Eli Diner: Capital Feels: Affect and Allegory. In: flashartonline.com. Flash Art, 2018, accessed February 9, 2020 .
  11. ↑ a b c d e f g h Jasper Bernes: Capital and Community: On Melanie Gilligan's Triology. In: www.metamute.org/. Mute Publishing, June 23, 2015, accessed January 6, 2020 .
  12. ↑ a b c Crisis in the Credit System - Blog - Frieze Publishing. (No longer available online.) In: frieze.com. web.archive.org, December 8, 2008, archived from the original on February 18, 2014 ; accessed on February 11, 2020 (English).
  13. ↑ a b c d e Melanie Gilligan. Solo exhibition as part of 'The last of their kind'. In: koelnischerkunstverein.de. Kölnischer Kunstverein, the artists, photographers and authors, 2018, accessed on January 7, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Melanie Gilligan - Galerie Max Mayer. In: maxmayer.net. Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, accessed on January 9, 2020 .
  15. ↑ a b c d e f Aileen Burns: Melanie Gilligan. In: artnews.com. Penske Business Media, August 30, 2010, accessed January 27, 2020 (American English).
  16. ↑ a b Articles - Banff Center. In: banffcentre.ca. Retrieved February 3, 2020 .
  17. ↑ a b c Acatia Finbow: Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art. Melanie Gilligan, Untitled 2011. In: tate.org.uk. The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, October 2015, accessed January 9, 2020 .
  18. ↑ a b The Common Sense (Phase 1-3, Episodes 1-15). In: d-est.com. D'EST, Ulrike Gerhardt, Associate Curator, accessed January 8, 2020 (American English).
  19. ↑ Amy Luo, Canadian Art, Winter 2015. Quoted from Melanie Gilligan The Common Sense Substitution. In: km-k.at. Kunstverein Medienturm in the "Künstlerhaus", accessed on January 6, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Magdalena Kröner: Melanie Gilligan . In: Frieze . Edition 14. Frieze Publishing Ltd., April 8, 2014, ISSN  0962-0672 (English, frieze.com [accessed January 26, 2020]).
  21. ^ Circular flow. On the economy of inequality. In: kunstmuseumbasel.ch. Kunstmuseum Basel, 2019, accessed on February 8, 2020 .
  22. ↑ Melanie Gilligan. In: centrevox.ca. VOX, center de l'image contemporaine, accessed on January 7, 2020 (Fri-FR).
  23. ↑ The Little Things Could Be Dearer. In: moma.org. The Museum of Modern Art, accessed January 6, 2020 .
  24. ↑ News Editor: Take Me To The River is a project about change and exchange in the contemporary space of flows. In: biennialfoundation.org. Biennial Foundation, May 11, 2015, accessed January 7, 2020 (American English).
  25. ↑ Melanie Gilligan: Parts-wholes. In: wattis.org. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, accessed February 11, 2020 .
  26. ↑ Melanie Gilligan - Popular Unrest. In: kunsthausglarus.ch. Kunsthaus Glarus, accessed on January 7, 2020 .
  27. ↑ Melanie Gilligan The Common Sense. In: zkm.de. ZKM Center for Art and Media, accessed on January 6, 2020 .
  28. ↑ a b PETIT MAL - Petit Mal. In: boomkat.com. Boomkat Digital Limited, accessed February 5, 2020 .
  29. ↑ a b c d e Paul Lester: New band of the day - No 387: Petit Mal . In: The Guardian . Guardian News & Media Limited, September 10, 2008, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed February 5, 2020]).
  30. ^ Paul Hamlyn Foundation Announces Winners of 2009 Awards for Artists. In: artforum.com. Artforum International Magazine, New York City, accessed January 26, 2020 (American English).
personal data
SURNAME Gilligan, Melanie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian video and installation artist, writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto