SOUND INSTALLATION OF THE WEEK: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land

Opening today at north London's The Showroom is a new work by British sound artists and theorists, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, presented by the Otolith Collective. Entitled On Vanishing Land, the 45 minute video piece is a 'magisterial audio-essay' that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo, in 2005. The collaboration presents a new form of 'sonic fiction' including the reflections of the artists, interviews, and commissions from digital musicians such as Baron Mordant, Ekoplekz, Gazelle Twin, Pete Wiseman, Blackest Ever Black's Raime and Skjolbrot.

6 February–30 March 2013; The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

GROUP SHOW OF THE WEEK: Frozen Lakes

New York's Artists Space presents Frozen Lakes, a group show aiming to examine the artistic strategies “quotation”, “excerptation”, “framing”, and “staging”, (as art historian Douglas Crimp defined in his 1977 Pictures exhibition) by a generation of artists born after Pictures. Made up of: Shadi Habib Allah, Ed Atkins, Banu Cennetoglu, Aaron Flint Jamison, Tobias Kaspar, Metahaven, Ken Okiishi, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Slavs and Tatars - the artists face the contemporary experience of images, saturated with a heightened notion of temporality. The sense that pictures occupy very distinct places in culture has been replaced by fluid modes of accumulation and aggregation. Filmmaker & writer Alexander Kluge has used the phrase “frozen lakes” in reference to montage, to create “still images” as a technique of focusing. By addressing the conditions of circulation as a means of exchange and value attribution, Frozen Lakes focuses on the blurred states between opacity and transparency.

20 January – 24 March, 2013; Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013

INSTALLATION OF THE WEEK: Corin Sworn at Chisenhale Gallery

Presented as the Canadian, Glasgow-based artist Corin Sworn’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date, The Rag Papers is a newly commissioned work exploring the nature of attention, reuse and appropriation. Comprising of a film as part of an installation with synchronised lighting and sound, the narrative shifts between the perspectives of three characters who interact with a series of objects set within carefully-designed domestic interiors. Sworn's previous work explored the social ordering of attention and how the changing nature of perception undermines control - often incorporate found images, over which she voices her own narratives, themselves composed from fragments of found texts. In The Rag Papers, Sworn continues this use of appropriation but renegotiates its terms, describing the work as ‘a seedy noir film that wishes it was an intellectual thriller’.

Preview: 7 February, on until 24 March, 2013

ART TALK OF THE WEEK: Guy Bourdin: A Legacy
 
As part of The ICA's season on photography, they will be hosting a panel discussion tonight (Weds 6 February) on the iconic provocative fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, whose super-composed, richly-colourful and playful imagery broke the boundaries of fashion convention. The event will include a screening of rare footage of Guy Bourdin’s cine films and a talk between Samuel Bourdin, the only son of Guy Bourdin and co-author of the publication on his father, Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin, and Philippe Garner (a Director of Christie’s and International Head of Photographs) and celebrated curator and international lecturer Judith Clark.

6 February; 6:45pm, Cinema 1, The ICA, London