Czech artist Roman Štětina presents new site-specific installation as part of citywide visual arts festival, Cardiff Contemporary:
Shave and a haircut – two bits is an installation by Czech artist Roman Štětina, on view from Thu 20 Oct – Sat 19 Nov 2016, as part of the citywide visual arts festival, Cardiff Contemporary. Curated by Louise Hobson, this will be Štětina’s first exhibition in Wales.
In ‘Shave and a haircut – two bits’, Štětina explores the narrative of call and response. Recurring gestures and motifs found in life and in film, like the knocking of a door, or the tuning of a radio, are here presented as static video works, which are more like moving photographs, or film stills. “It’s about trying to reach someone, and not getting any answer, or at least not the answer you expected. It’s about presence and absence, longing and letting go,” says Štětina.
Roman Štětina’s work investigates the ways in which broadcast media including film, television and radio are produced. Through videos, installations and sculptures he makes visible the props, technologies and studios of ‘backstage’. For Cardiff Contemporary, Štětina approaches the festival theme of ‘communication’ through the concept of radio as a form of one way communication: “With radio, someone is transmitting, you are receiving and there’s no way, if you are a listener, to answer,” says Štětina.
The exhibition venue, an unidentifiable back room in the city centre, has the appearance of being out of space, and out of time, like a film set and it has come to play an integral role in the production of ‘Shave and a haircut – two bits’. Through a series of light box images, the space is mirrored back into the space, a reflection of a reflection as if somehow the space is perpetuating its own fiction. And it’s inside this reflection of the room, that Roman has situated his four film works.
Roman says: “When you are reflecting the space where you are, you are somehow supporting the space, again and again. This is the space reflecting itself, reflecting itself, reflecting itself, reflecting how it’s reflecting itself, itself, itself. So, loop, loop, loop, and then you place something there that doesn’t belong to the space. Something that’s coming from the other world, a different world, it’s a story maybe; it’s a narrative, an abstract narrative.”
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‘Shave and a haircut – two bits’ will be revealed as part the fourth edition of the visual arts biennial, which once again draws together international and Wales-based artists to charge the city streets, galleries, forgotten spaces and communities with the crackle of new and exciting ideas in multi-disciplinary visual, sonic and performance arts for 31 days. The biennial sets up base in a temporary hub, ‘The Angel’ developed to include four new gallery spaces across a derelict former motorcycle garage beneath the city’s Angel Hotel.
Taking in historic sites from the city centre to Cardiff Bay, brand new commissions will radiate across Cardiff, including impressive new public sculpture along one of Cardiff’s most public landmarks and the takeover of the imposing-yet-defunct Customs and Immigration House at Cardiff Bay for an exhilarating, public reclamation.
Artists and groups confirmed include: Megan Broadmeadow, Laura Ford, Roman Štětina with curator Louise Hobson, Robert Montgomery, Heather and Ivan Morison, Anthony Shapland, Rob Smith and Charles Danby, tactileBOSCH, Spit & Sawdust with Edwin Burdis and a collaboration between Locus Collective (Richard James, Angharad Van Rjiswijk), comedian and writer, Stewart Lee and Andy Fung. Cardiff Contemporary is being delivered by Cardiff Council in partnership with the city’s business, artists and communities, working collaboratively in an unprecedented way. The festival is developed by Visual Arts Manager, Ruth Cayford.
The themes and overarching title for the festival, ‘Are You Ready?’ is a direct reference to the residency of Guglielmo Marconi in the city. As an exile from Italy where his pioneering vision was met with scepticism, he was supported by the British Post Office to develop his experiments into radio communications technology. Assisted by local engineer, George Kemp, Marconi succeeded in transmitting those three, immortal words in Morse code from Flat Holm Island in the Bristol Channel to Lavernock Point, Glamorgan on 13 May 1897. Just four years later, the pair succeeded in the first transatlantic radio transmission. Artists have been asked to consider this history and the modern age of instant and relentless communication in developing new work.
Creating a period of citywide, creative celebration, Cardiff Contemporary coincides with Artes Mundi 7 art prize and exhibition (opening Friday 21 October at National Museum Cardiff and Chapter) and a major exhibition of S Mark Gubb and Mike Kelley, as well as a new commission by Freya Dooley at g39.
Full information on each commission, dates, times and locations, plus further events including screenings, talks and workshops, will be published on Cardiff Contemporary’s website: www.cardiffcontemporary.co.uk. Connect with Cardiff Contemporary on social media:
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Cardiff Contemporary is funded by the City of Cardiff Council and the Arts Council of Wales.
