Laetitia Paviani & Camilla Wills

BABY DOC Rip Currents, Permanent Dew

20.04.2016–12.06.2016

Kunsthal Aarhus presents a new exhibition project by Laetitia Paviani (FR) & Camilla Wills (UK).

In Spring 2016 Kunsthal Aarhus opens a new series of solo exhibitions in Gallery 1 at the Kunsthal. The programme with the name BODY BODY focuses on young international contemporary art and presents four exhibitions by artists with an interest in current themes such as performativity, body, social communities, digital as well as physical. The exhibition programme is created by Jacob Fabricius, new Artistic Director at Kunsthal Aarhus.

The first artists in the exhibition series BODY BODY are Laetitia Paviani (FR) and Camilla Wills (GB), who have been collaborating on the magazine BABY DOC. The magazine is a symbiotic project between two women dealing with sharing thoughts, knowledge and friendship. The project BABY DOC Rip Currents, Permanent Dew is a reflection on how we grow up, create identities, copy our surroundings and pass through different stages of power and powerlessness. With BABY DOC Rip Currents, Permanent Dew the audience gets an insight in to the third issue of the magazine and a world of fiction, politics, poetry, art and personal experiences – presented in an exhibition and a magazine.

A little magazine is like the start of a river. Sometimes you see a river alongside a mountain and it looks like nothing ― it’s only trickling. Think of Holderlin’s poem about the Rhine. What I like most about that poem is the beginning ― he starts in a little crevice, like a little hole, at the beginning of the Rhine. That they rarely last is almost part of their nature. They are not meant to last. They are meant to follow a person’s impulse, to gather works, which may become literature much later. In this way, small magazines are full of hope.
- Etel Adnan, Bidoun.org

Laetitia Paviani and Camilla Wills explain the project:

The door of the gallery is imagined as a hole, a suction. Like in a plane, if the door (security) breaks open all objects get aspirated, sucked out. What is the movement of this aspiration, of this suck (instability). We have made a RIP-tide of small decorative paddles, flowing from one door. Some of these paddles are functional made in hardwood, others replicated with moulded plaster. The latter would dissolve in water like an aspirin. Translucent oil (permanent dew) and acrylic prints on paper that show stains of women working at out-dated apple computers and incorporate sentences from Mother Teresa’s ‘dark (crisis of faith) letters’, are sucked into the second doorway. These faithless works are suspended low, drifting and exposed. There are many surviving bodies in this superstitious current. Contributors Camille Roy and James Whittingham are both represented in the exhibition as colourful smiles exchanged in the restless black&white flow. In which we try to turn thought into object and object into language. Space becomes time, place becomes mind. Lucky 22 x

BABY DOC is a magazine that grows bigger with each issue, conceived and edited by Laetitia Paviani and Camilla Wills. BABY DOC is a doubled body. BABY DOC vulnerability (creation) and BABY DOC brutality (military dictator). Each issue is released with an exhibition that transmits a context for the magazine's fluctuating form. The project interrogates how publishing practices can be spatially represented, an in turn how making work can be re-invented through the mechanisms inherent to publishing and distribution (circulation, flow). Or more specifically those qualities inherent to feminist and queer publishing practices.

The magazine BABY DOC can be bought in the café for DKK 50.

Camille Roy’s most recent book is Sherwood Forest, from Futurepoem (2011). Roy has taught creative writing in multiple genres and forms at several institutions, most recently at San Francisco State University. I don't teach creative writing anymore. I'm now implementing a computer language for artificial intelligence and machine learning called Inkling. Computer science and computer languages have long been a focus of interest for me.

James Whittingham is an artist based in London. Recent exhibitions and publications include The Worsening Situation at the Penarth Centre, London and Drones & Dresses, to be published by OCR.

Exhibition period: 20 April–12 June 2016
Opening: 20 April, 5pm
Opening performance: Laetitia Paviani and Camilla Wills

The exhibition is supported by Statens Kunstfond, Det Obelske Familiefond and Aarhus Kommune

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