Alex Martinis Roe—Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange

Pallas Projects/Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane/Goethe Institut

Workshops, archives, white-boards and stenographers. The documents, objects, and images (moving and still) in Alex Martinis Roe’s exhibitions are dependent on the artwork’s interlocutors (workshop participants and exhibition viewers), whose specific encounters with her (frame)works are recorded without attempting to transparently communicate the content of that experience/activity. The artist employs and facilitates the act of writing to engage thoughts and fantasies that are embedded within the human unconscious through interactive, performative sessions. In her practice, discussions become – via the coded products of a stenographer’s hand – abstract data banks hung on the gallery wall; while participants write upon white-boards with white chalk, the next written layer overwriting the last, accumulations of dust gathering beneath the writers’ feet.

Martinis Roe’s practice is concerned with the performative efficacy of art and facilitating feminist relations both within the art encounter and its historicization. Her assertion – that the effect of conventional spatio-temporal orientations between not only speakers and listeners, but also writers and readers/artworks and audiences is in need of analysis – is informed by textual and personal encounters with Belgian feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. Starting from communications between the artist and Irigaray, Martinis Roe has developed an expansive project that features pre-recorded Skype conversations between academics, a workshop facilitated by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, a box- file entry into the library of Dublin’s Goethe Institut, a publication and an exhibition at Pallas Projects.

Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange explores experimental formats for discourse that have the potential to both open up and create affirmative ways to historicise genealogies of authorship - especially female genealogies. These formats all incorporate methods of non-linear transcription, which actively enter authorial genealogies into an archive that both directs and highlights its own means of production. The exhibition experience of these “transcripts”, which are informed by embodied modes of theoretical exchange, attempt to both reconsider and reshape the activity of the viewer. Online video conferencing is the material for this series of conversations between the artist’s interlocutors, who have influenced the shape of this current project and those writers who have had a profound influence on their work. These conversations address the nature of each authorial genealogy in its specific combination of textual relations and direct engagement, and indirectly explore practices that include feminist genealogies in the way authorship is understood. The display of this material – not representations, but fragments of each event – is split spatially and temporally, fostering deliberation over the choice to engage.

A box file containing audio recordings and archival material is available as part of the Goethe Institut catalogue and is accessible at the library of Goethe-Institut Irland, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.

Search the Goethe Institut catalogue

Read Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange publication

PP—Info Sheet

Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange Catalogue cards

Biography:

Alex Martinis Roe is an Australian artist living and working in Berlin. She completed her PhD in Fine Arts at Monash University Australia with the Silver Jubilee Scholarship in 2010. In 2006-7 she was a resident at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, and since 2009 she has lived and worked at the Kunsthaus KuLe, Berlin. Recent exhibitions include HaVE A LoOk! Have a Look! FormContent, London (2010); Encounters: Conversation in Practice at Limbus Europae, Berlin (solo) and at the Sexuate Subjects Conference UCL, London (2010); Opening Lines, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, (2010); Discreet Objects, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne (2010); Affirmations, Light Projects, Melbourne (solo) (2010). Martinis Roe has been published in art magazines such as Art & Australia and Un Magazine issue 3.1 (both 2009). She is to embark on a studio residency, culminating in a major exhibition at Artspace, Sydney in January 2012.