Uri Aran

1 Sep-1 Oct 2016

Overview

Uri Aran’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ will feature an interrelated group of videos, sculptures and paintings. Throughout these works, Aran probes the concept of genre – whether theatrical or artistic – and its reliance on conventions of structure, gesture and affect. Two Things About Suffering (2016), the video which gives its title to the exhibition, manipulates and magnifies these elements. Two men (one of them the artist’s twin brother – a kind of second self) are seen pacing together in an indistinct walled space, against the strains of an orchestral score. One of the nameless characters speculates on “the conditions in which we are expected to act”. Through the men’s disjointed monologues and actions – alternating between the casual and choreographed – these ‘conditions’ become the dominant subject of the work.