PAST EXHIBITION ::::
Allora & Calzadilla: Sentiments, Sediments
(Figures of Speech)

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 18, 2007 5:30 - 7:30pm
Exhibition Dates: October 18—December 15, 2007
Curated by Hou Hanru

The reception includes a live operatic interpretation of texts selected by the artists, performed by students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. View video of opening reception

The third and final movement in a trilogy of site-specific sound-focused installations, the Allora and Calzadilla exhibition carries forward lines of investigation the artists opened first in Clamor (at the Moore Space in Miami in 2006) and then in Wake Up (at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007). The trilogy of exhibitions comprises a series of works that counterpose militarism and war with adroit manipulations of sound, music, and—in this new project for the first time—spoken word.

Strategically seeking out the sounds of combat as their sonic media, Allora and Calzadilla redeploy petrified—if still petrifying—riffs like reveille in ways that fundamentally challenge the ostensible glories the drumbeats of war traditionally encode. Part of their collaborative task has been to track such martial sound effects to their precognitive hideouts “under the skin,” where the body is agitated and stirred before the mind has had a chance to reflect—the hangouts, in short, of an unthinking patriotism. Allora and Calzadilla’s endeavor to reissue sounds whose meanings have grown far too familiar is an effort to restructure, at the source, those corporeal conformities—always marked in and on the body already—through which violent and potentially devastating action first becomes possible. In the new work for the Walter and McBean Galleries, this same system of undoing is set in motion against the equally inured fixations of the word—from the grain of the speaking voice to the artificial diction of operatic language and political oration.

Never limiting themselves to a single medium, Allora and Calzadilla complement their far-resonating, site-sensitive interrogations of sound and word with a suite of recent works in video: Returning a Sound (2004), Under Discussion (2005), Amphibious (2005), Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands (2006), Unrealizable Goals (2007), and There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007), the last of which recently premiered at the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. As a literal testimony to their thematic precedence in Allora and Calzadilla’s oeuvre, these videos will be on view starting 2 October in the Walter and McBean Galleries, that is, two weeks before the opening of the exhibition proper. The preemptive presence and visibility of Allora and Calzadilla’s video work on the SFAI campus—in particular, Returning a Sound—will reinforce the deeper context of the ensuing installation, namely, Allora and Calzadilla’s active participation, from 2001 to 2004, in the acts of civil disobedience in Vieques (the island off Puerto Rico used by the US Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 to 2003) that eventually led to its partial evacuation by the US government.

Consistent with the comprehensive rearticulation of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, which look beyond the traditional histories and narratives of exhibition and curatorial practice, Allora and Calzadilla were invited to exploit, as fully as possible, the intricacies of the SFAI campus—to conceive of it, in other words, as what Hou Hanru, SFAI’s director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, has called “a dynamic site of production instead of a static venue for mere representation.” The third and final movement in an ideologically critical, three-city trilogy, Allora and Calzadilla’s current project could literally not have assumed the concrete, site-specific form it will in fact assume anywhere else than at the Walter and McBean Galleries.

The entire project will be captured and reflected upon in a joint publication slated to appear in 2008.