Wiebke Leister: Serpent Symbolisms
Residency 25 Sep-25 Oct 2024
Of old, snakes have embodied conflicting hybridities that represent wisdom and deceit, danger and healing, redemption and destruction - an ambiguous iconography of 'good-and-evil'' that manifests the polyvalent elements of the serpentine.
During her residency, Wiebke will work on translating her earlier live performance 'Serpent Symbolisms' - a response to Nicolas Poussin's 'Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake' (c 1648) through sound, photography and movement - into a publication format: looking at animalistic encirclings and entrapments in text and image to explore foreboding shadows by way of different degrees of fear. "Still thinking: Sinister thuds through sombre thrashings soon shall suffice amongst those seemingly sensuous silences once secretly sewn."
Image from 'Serpent Symbolisms', 2024 (The National Gallery, Friday Lates, 21 June 2024, Room 31 - sound: David Toop, performance: Ania Psenitsnikova, projection: Wiebke Leister)
Event 1:
Regina Dürig & Wiebke Leister: 'Recreaturing Melusine', Tue 8 Oct 2024, 6-8pm
Don’t, don’t - don’t ever look at her. You can marry her, you can talk to her, you can sleep with her, but don’t - don’t ever look at Melusine, not on that day of the week when her secret tail appears.
Of course, you will anyway - and she will then leave you and your stone castle. With her body, half-snake and half-human, she is thus exiled. Obstructed in her stride, forced into hiding. Her myth, a story about male gazing, about possession and passage, scars and seams.
In their experimental reading Recreaturing Melusine, artist Wiebke Leister (UK/GE) and writer Regina Dürig (SUI/GE) explore hybrid fragmentation of bodily parts as creative practice and refractory resource. Circling around woman-snake-creatures, the performance will incorporate scored readings as well as visual-textual improvisations.
Image from Wiebke Leister: 'Serpent Symbolisms', 2024
Address: The Writer' Room, Holy Trinity Church, Cloudesley Square, London N1 0HN
link: https://writersroom.org.uk/
@florencetrust
@wild_pansy_press
@wiebkeleister
@regina-duerig
Bios:
Regina Dürig was born in Mannheim in 1982 and lives in Biel. She is an author, performer and lecturer in literary writing and has published miniatures, short stories, radio plays, children’s books and young adult novels. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Peter Härtling Prize, the Wartholz Literature Prize and the Literature Prize of the Canton of Bern.
Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. Her research aims to understand how movement enters the structure of the still image, and how the liveness of viewing interacts with our interpretative processes. Building on her earlier research into the ambiguous character of snake-women in Japanese theatre, she is currently researching themes of contradictory Serpent-Symbolisms in the collection of the National Gallery. Her recent book ‘Echoes & Callings: A Hannya Manifesto’ was published with Ma Bibliothèque in 2023.
EVENT 2:
The Expanded Librarian: 'Character-Sketches of Text+Image Searchings', Fri 25 Oct 2024, 6-8pm
With Elias Canetti's revisitation of Theophastus' characters in mind, we will be introducing eccentric portrayals of different artistic researchers and their searching processes that are based on how Text+Image come together in artistic practices.
You are invited to spy onto their desks or into their studio spaces, finding the Expanded Librarian as a hunter or gatherer, as inventor or finder, as chaser or pursuer, explorer or investigator, enquirer or forager. Always asking: What gestures do Expanded Librarians adopt? What are they looking for? How does their searching operate? Who do they meet on the way? What does s/he make? How does s/he choose results? What kind of language is being used to speak of their artistic findings and outcomes? Which active verbs, descriptive identifiers or visual locators? How do they bring image and text together as part of the same work?
2-5pm: character writing and publication workshop for invited participant, asking: how do we document or represent their multi-medial doings as acts of active transmission between Text+Image.