The Mirror at Night features Tabatha Andrews, Keith Bowler, Louise Bristow, Maria Chevska, Gary Dennis, Nooshin Farhid, Lucy Gunning, Susie Hamilton, Lee Holden, Lizzie Hughes, Deeqa Ismail, Lucy Jagger, Simon Leahy-Clark, Fabian Peake, Jon Ridge, Giorgio Sadotti, Christine Stark, Peter Suchin, Chris Tosic, Steven Wong, Mark Woods.
Malcolm Bowie has observed that the most famous thing about the 19th century poet Stephane Mallarme is the “often exceptionally difficult” nature of his work. For The Mirror at Night twenty-one artists have been invited to respond to the final stanza of Mallarme’s notoriously elusive poem Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx (1887), and have been given, together with a copy of the original French sonnet, seven different English translations of the relevant three lines. The lack of a strict correspondence between the various renditions only serves to emphasise the poem’s inherent ambiguity, a term defined by William Empson as “alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
The chosen poetic image, reinvented in English and clearly apparent in the original, portrays a mirror in which is reflected a headless female form and a constellation of seven points of light
The Mirror at Night builds upon a willingness to reread and move outwards from what one may term the “trigger text” at the centre of this show. Rereading is, as Roland Barthes so elegantly framed the matter, “no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different)…not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new”.
References:
Stephane Mallarme, Keith Bosley (Ed.), Mallarme The Poems, Penguin, 1977, pp. 168-171
Malcolm Bowie, Mallarme and the Art of Being Difficult, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. viii.
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Penguin, 1961, p. 1.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 16.
The Mirror at Night press release
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