The long line of blue triangular clocks, Beyond the will to measure (2015), sets up a choreograohed reading of the walls, now inhabited by wavy contours. Together with the series of sculptures What instruments have we (1-5) – a series of clocks on stands – these works incorporated the larger installation Comedy of Margin Theatre, (2015), a theatrical space were we navigate on a dynamic staging of colourful walls, the perfect mise-en-scéne for wondering about one's environment. The improvisational reading of this scenario allows a non-linear relation to mobility and modalities of representation, diverging between an experiential reading of other kinds of time, and an environment “a structure to be alive inside”.
On GB11, Emily Roysdon (1977 Easton/Stockholm) is also presenting Untitled (calendar #1-16), a series of silver gelatin photograms. These where made in a darkroom without a negative. Roysdon uses a limited palette of objects that reference formal abstraction, the shadow/ shape of a light bulb, and moon calendars. The objects (some of which are but plugs) are placed under the enlarger lend in the darkroom and used like a sundial. Each shape is a separate exposure. The calendars come from the idea of using light to measure time but making is disorderly, abstract, and symbolic.
Exploring the regimes of “uncounted experience, unseen in time”, Roysdon develops an over-arching practice which involves many collaborators and modalities of making, in a broad oeuvre that can be called a political acupuncture on the histories of affects. And as recounting the manifold history of diversity involves necessarily a plurality of tools, her practice comprises publications, stagings, films, curations, and other ephemeral encounters, as a mode of addressing the complex task which is that of representing queer lives.
Ecstatic Resistance (2009), is a good example of such project, where Roysdon takes the role of the curator or the assembler of affective perspectives, creating an exhibition and publication with several performative moments provided by many contributors. Addressing the “Pleasure in the domain of resistance”, she simultaneously celebrates and analysEs the dynamics of protest and cultural imaginary of queer subjects, questioning universalizing and impossible models. While navigating the terrains of refracted representations and the undercommons, Roysdon intends to ask what are collectivities, their pleasure regimes, and how they are socially imagined. She was a founding member of the queer feminist, new york-based collective LTTR (Lesbians To The Rescue, Listen Translate Translate Record, Lacan Teaches To Read, etc). MM
self-presentation:
Emily Roysdon has three moms, read “How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won” with Eqbal Ahmad, and grew up inside of LTTR.
