AVANT KINEMA at SHANDY HALL

PRESS RELEASE August 2021

This weekend sees the launch of Imprints: Art Editing Modernism, an exhibition of art inspired by works of Modernist literature. The exhibition, which runs from Saturday 28th August to Saturday 11th September 2021 at the Shandy Hall gallery in Coxwold Yorkshire, is presented by Glasgow University's Imprints of the New Modernist Editing project in conjunction with The Laurence Sterne Trust. 

Scottish Borders based interdisciplinary artists, Avant Kinema - Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian - were first commissioned by Imprints in 2019 to create a work for the exhibition inspired by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé's difficult final poem, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897).

Swan and Simian's finished piece, Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice, is an ambitious work comprising of multiple forms, including: film, an art book, sculpture, prints, photography, poetry and a deck of tarot style cards based on "twelve virgin symbols" extracted from Mallarmé's poem.

The exhibition "includes work in a variety of media, including paintings, drawing, sound works, digital prints, letterpress, silkscreen and engravings, sculpture, collage, and artists’ books, responding to texts from a range of different languages and cultures". It was originally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020 but was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What this unexpected throw of the dice did do, in the case of Avant Kinema, was to allow them an extra year in the company of Mallarmé and his work.

"We've always loved the French Symbolist poets," says Roger, "mainly because of their influence on Patti Smith and other rock lyricists, but neither of us was all that familiar with Stéphane Mallarmé. We'd never even heard of Un coup de dés until this commission came up."

"We soon grew to love him and his work, though," continues Sarahjane. "The lockdowns allowed us time to do that indepth. Un coup de dés is amazing when you delve into it, a typographical experiment, totally groundbreaking for its time, one of the earliest free form poems."

"Yes," adds Roger. "It's widely seen as a big influence on the early 20th century Modernist art movements, including DADA and Surrealism, concrete poetry, the look of manifestos from the Futurists to the Vorticists, so it immediately seemed familiar to us."

"In a lot of ways Un coup de dés is as much about visual imagery, rhythm and musicality as it is about the words," says Sarahjane, "so it seemed natural to us to take an interdisciplinary approach to trying to interpret it. One of the more unusual things I've done for this project is to create a mobile sculpture and eleven still images using shells and feathers in place of words, strictly following the sizing, word count and lay-out of Mallarmé's poem. Roger has written new poems, as well as producing a new literary translation of Un coup de dés, and we've worked together on film, sound and music, prints, playing cards and publications to try and capture the essence of the original."

Roger: "Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice is our attempt to translate the "untranslatable"."

Sarahjane: "This is very much an original work really but hugely influenced by Mallarmé's poem. We both think he would approve."

As well as working on the Imprints of the New Modernist Editing commission throughout 2020 into 2021, the duo have been busy with various other projects, including inventing a fictional 21st century art movement, oobROY, which included its own "Smashed Glass Manifestos". A PDF version is available on the website of Brighton based arts collective Exploding Appendix.