The Unnamable Sebastian Buerkner Laure Prouvost Duncan Campbell

20 April–28 May 2006 20–30 April 2006 4–14 May 2006 18–28 May 2006
Opening hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm Private view: Wednesday 19 April, 6–9pm Private view: Wednesday 3 May, 6–9pm Private view: Wednesday 17 May, 6–9pm

With a nod to Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable consists of three short shows loosely themed around
the notion of gaps in language and experience: the primæval stratum to everyday existence, the back-
ground hum of subjective states which never quite break through into the world of speech, commerce
and common sense. This inchoate stream of velleities and half-fleshed fantasies can be unspeakably
trivial, or unutterably disturbing.
The video works presented in the exhibition each, in their different ways, evoke these
subliminal states. Sebastian Buerkner’s The Conversation involves an ongoing attempt to develop
visual dictionaries, a shadow language of images which are associated with particular sounds or
words, but which gradually take on a life of their own. Laure Prouvost’s Abstractions Quotidiennes are
synaesthetic stories in which abject details, examined in tactile close-up, give rise to elaborate and
macabre fictions. Duncan Campbell’s Falls Burns Malone Fiddles examines a series of photographs
from a Belfast community archive, as the narrator questions not only his own position as observer but
his very existence.
The Unnamable is the first collaboration between Lounge and LUX. The exhibition
consists of three two-week solo gallery shows, presenting works which have not been exhibited in
London before.
A Lounge/LUX project
Lounge,
28 Shacklewell Lane,
London E8
www.lounge-gallery.com
www.lux.org.uk/theunnamable
Poster image: Laure Prouvost
Sebastian Buerkner’s The Conversation (2006) takes the form of three Micromedia Flash animations
projected simultaneously, in portrait format, on separate screens. They document a conversation
between three individuals represented by actor’s voices. Like an exercise in Freudian free association
the apparently inconsequential discussion is accompanied by images that provide the viewer with
brief glimpses into the subconscious of the protagonists. Buerkner has created a series of vignettes,
animated pictograms, that accompany each and every spoken word. These moving images are
individual to each speaker and reveal something of their lives as they form chains of associated
imagery. So, for example, as one character uses the word ‘thinking’ a black and white graphic appears
on screen that resembles some kind of yin and yang pattern or a computer rendering icon. The word
‘far’, used by another protagonist, is accompanied by the sight of an airplane passing far overhead;
‘love’ by a couple embarrassing one another in front of a stylized sunset (recalling the graphics found
on a packet of contraceptives); ‘believe’’ by the sight of a church minister juggling a three dimensional
‘B’ and ‘hope’ by a shooting star. Buerkner’s work brings to mind the statement by Guy Debord in The
Society of Spectacle (1967) that ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation’. Our
most intimate and profound thoughts have had superficial iconographies imposed upon them by the
mass media. Buerkner remixes these iconographies to create a surreal standoff.
The Conversation follows three earlier works including Walker (2005). This work, presented on a
single screen, records the activity of a drifter or flâneur variously lying in bed at night, smoking a
cigarette and driving a car. The character is barely seen but is represented by fleeting (to the point of
being almost subliminal) images and symbols of ideas and memories that pass through their mind.
The imagery is ambiguous and the viewer is left to draw their own interpretation of these daydreams.
The flat imagery employed by Buerkner is clichéd but realised with a very particular, illustrative
style that hints at his training as a painter. His visual vocabulary appears to draw inspiration from a
wide variety of sources including graphics from the GDR (where he grew up), from evangelical posters
outside so-called charismatic churches, magic eye posters, the primary forms of Modernism and cheap
interior design from twenty years ago. Dissatisfied with the limitations of painting and eager to take
full control of every aspect of the production and dissemination of his work, in 2004, Buerkner
abandoned painting, at least with traditional media, to work with Flash - a multimedia graphics
program primarily used for website design. He describes how with Flash he can make and distribute
his work from a desktop computer (following the lead of electronic musicians who, from the late
1980s, made and distributed their activity from home). Flash allows Buerkner to work not just as a
painter, but as a sculptor, a director, an actor, a product designer, etc. Also, by creating digital works
and reinventing existing, almost archetypal, vocabularies, Buerkner can be seen to be working in
something of a conceptual tradition following Douglas Heubler’s statement of 1969: ‘The world is full
of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’
– Rob Tufnell
Sebastian Buerkner was born in Berlin in 1975. He studied Fine Art, at University of Halle/Saale in
One of the watchwords in contemporary video and photography during the past decade or so has been
‘narrative’. The candid, the documentary and the aesthetic have been sidelined somewhat by the pull
of the narrative image, whether it be moving or still. Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Douglas
Gordon, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sophy Rickett, Hannah Starkey and Bill Viola are just some artists
who have foregrounded the idea of the narrative image. In her compact, raw-edged video pieces,
Laure Prouvost provides narratives that seem to parody the whole genre from which they spring;
with their wall-to-wall hyperbole and whimsical fantasy, they charm and disturb at the same time.
The surreal dreamlike commentaries that accompany Prouvost’s visuals in her ‘stories’ series are
often only tentatively connected with the images that they accompany and even those connections
seem loose and wayward, prising open the interstices of existence. Here we have surreal subject
matter vying for credibility, gripping yarns goading us into believing, but just like any journalistic
excess, always falling short. Is she trying to emulate real life here, cooking up complex metaphors
for the illusions and untruths that the media would have us swallow?
Prouvost’s commentaries also have a tone of quiet intimacy: she seems to be sharing confidences,
secret observations, and her mesmeric narratives have a hint of hypnotic suggestion, drawing us
irrevocably into their confused, illogical world. In her Abstractions Quotidiennes series, bland visuals
of peripheral urban spaces give way to colour-saturated monochrome screens that have the same
transfixing power as James Turrell’s light projections, but also act as a backcloth, a blank slate, for
the abstract visions we might conjure from Prouvost’s eccentric, uncomfortably emotive cameos of the
quotidian. Here things are slimy, things drip and slither, they are unbearably hot or chillingly cold,
there are threats of violence in a remorseless procession of the repulsive and the degraded, of which
H.P. Lovecraft would be justly proud.
Self-deprecating illusions thrust us in and out of a bizarre fantasy world, which is both richly
imaginative and outrageously implausible. The raw and flawed, artless aesthetic of Prouvost’s
visuals echoes the motto of Prouvost & Sons Ltd. – “we promote imperfection” – and brings to mind a
statement by the critic and commentator, Pavel Buchler in his book Ghost Stories where he writes: “to
produce a blurred photograph has come to be seen as the exclusive right of the professional, even a
sure sign of the professional mandate, whereas the same blurred image taken by the lay photographer
implies a ‘human error’.” Here he is thinking of the work of such photographers as Uta Barth or Bill
Jacobson, and while Provoust’s aesthetic fits neatly into this mould, her make-believe company,
Provoust & Sons Ltd. should certainly hold back from listing themselves on the Stock Exchange.
The strands of parody, poetry and flimsy deception that are closely entwined in Prouvost’s canon
of work, through which satire, irony, whimsy and fantasy seamlessly operate, offer us many levels on
which to read the work; but however we choose to perceive it at any one particular moment, we
cannot help but be charmed by the sheer inventiveness and sense of mischief through which these
works have been conceived.
– Roy Exley
Extracted from Short Tales / Tall Stories: The Video Art of Laure Prouvost
falter,
I…
The past is not a story and a picture cannot tell it. On the face of it, this might be a reasonable
summary of Duncan Campbell’s work. But it’s only the most elementary beginning; from this
understanding, Campbell ventures forth and bloody-mindedly attempts a reconstruction of the story
anyway. His is a process of simultaneous negation and negotiation; moreover it’s a statement of his
(and our) complex implication in the making of meaning more generally.
Falls Burns Malone Fiddles is his confrontation with representations of Belfast from the 1970s
and ’80s, and simultaneously with the interpretation and investment-with-meaning that these
representations have encountered since. They are not the expected, well-known news footage (riots
and explosions and running gun battles on terraced streets); they are taken from the archives of two
community photography organisations in West Belfast, and even then they are not the expected,
well-known depictions of that place. Sifting through thousands of negatives and hundreds of contact
sheets, and through unsorted boxes of prints, Campbell has selected images which seem to sit
somewhere beneath or behind those that we might already know. These are the backgrounds, the
cutaways: buildings, alleys, parkas, hairstyles, underexposed, improbably cropped, all of them
inchoate and unable to coalesce. Divis Flats, just before they were demolished. Graffiti – a suggestion
of what we were looking for, radical chic, latent mark of a rebel pose.
The title of the piece is drawn from a republican poster produced early in the Troubles, a
variation on the old proverb that bemoans the failure of middle-class Catholics (on Belfast’s affluent
Malone Road) to intervene while their poorer cousins down the hill were getting burnt out of their
homes. Campbell reproduces the screen-printed text from this poster in the film’s opening sequence
and does not comment further. Anyone not familiar with Northern Ireland may recognise the first
name but they won’t know the second, and for all its pleasing rhythm the phrase will not yield its
meaning.
A voice interjects, tries to order this information and present it to us. At one point the voice tries
to lipsync to speech that has been lost or cut out from the archive footage. The voice corrals external
supports and theoretical bases for socio-historical interpretations that never materialise. The
narrative rapidly disintegrates into tenuousness, opacity and frustration. At a certain point, a thin
black line suddenly starts to unroll across the screen, tracing the outlines of buildings, drawing
diagrams excised from arcane sociological textbooks, introducing another layer of attempted
description (or delineation). In the end, the voice doesn’t even know where to start, and the line forms
into a wedge that obscures the image beneath, so that the supposed focus of the exercise eventually
becomes lost in the elaborate, failed hermeneutic constructed around and on top of it.
Ultimately, the more complete the archive, the more inconsistent and impenetrable it will
become. Over time, contexts that were immediate are rendered obscure, references are forgotten and
the narrative threads its way through fewer and fewer of these once fresh and immediate incidentals.
History, inflexible and intransigent (even in its periodic revisions), asserts itself. The past reluctantly

Germany and Chelsea College in London. Having initially worked in sculpture, he has recently begun
to work with Flash animation. His video work has been included in a number of shows, including
Pilot 2, London (2005) and Centre of Attention at the Rio, London (2005), and he has recently been
commissioned to make a film for broadcast on Channel 4 by animate! (www.animateonline.org).
He lives and works in London.
www.sebastianbuerkner.com
www.lux.org.uk/featured/prouvost.htm
Laure Prouvost was born in Lille in 1978. Since graduating from St Martins College of Art and
Design, she has produced a variety of video-based works for both screening and installation.
Exhibitions include Nowhere Else But Here, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (2004) and Fabula,
National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford (2003). She currently curates videos
for tank magazine’s ‘online gallery’ tank tv (www.tank.tv). She lives and works in London.
www.laureprouvost.com
tells its story.
– Daniel Jewesbury
Duncan Campbell was born in Dublin in 1972. He completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in
1998 and BA Fine Art at the University of Ulster, 1996. Recent exhibitions include Art From Glasgow,
Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2005), Falls Burns Malone Fiddles, Galerie Luis Campana, Cologne
(2004) and Manifesta 5 European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2004).
He lives and works in Glasgow and is represented by Galerie Luis Campana, Cologne.
 The Unnamable

Sebastian Buerkner
Laure Prouvost
Duncan Campbell