Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen : Luna Eclipse, Oasis Dream

The exhausted body of a thoroughbred horse, soil upturned through geopolitical voodoo, blinking lights conjuring irrational thinking, the song of sirens, the demise of a linear future.

Luna Eclipse, Oasis Dream is the culmination of Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen’s Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship and first act of their long-term project, Nearly Winning, which considers gambling as a contemporary condition. Imagining the exhibition as an organism, the artists bring together sculpture, film, light, sound, scent and text to create a space inspired by the subliminal strategies which induce self-delusion as a way of seeing.

Taking inspiration from Brown and Venturi’s "Learning from Las Vegas" as much as Brian O’Doherty’s "Inside the White Cube"—both examining how spaces are conferred symbolic meaning and structures—the exhibition is arranged as a space in which the lighting, sound, scent and atmosphere all follow subliminal strategies devised by the gambling industry.

A trance-like soundscape hangs in the air, oxygen levels are raised as the lights occasionally break into blinking patterns echoing the "siren song" of a slot machine display (The Dancefloor, 2019). A scent commissioned from a marketing company (The Restraint, 2019) overlays musk with synthetic molecules that mimic human pheromones and the stress-like smell of the Dead Horse Arum Lily.

The new film work The Odds (part 1) brings together racehorses anaesthetised and collapsed on ketamine in a "knockdown box," showgirls from a casino in Macau belonging to the world’s biggest political donor, and Steve Ignorant from anarcho punk band Crass performing in a bingo hall originally built as a cinema designed to look like a church. Produced specifically for a large LED screen, the footage is overlaid with pulsating light formations inspired by Vegas techniques of visual seduction. The interconnections evoked draw logic from apophenia—a psychiatric term describing the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things or patterns in random information. The resulting assemblage is eternally based on luck, and responsive to the other elements in the space.

Elsewhere is a constellation of objects, a sculpture made from scans of the collapsed bodies of thoroughbred racehorses (The Fall, 2019), casino chips made in China from clay dug out in Jerusalem (The Circuit, 2019), a subtitle track projected on the wall and a glass replica of one of the artists’ eyes (The Opening, 2019), hovering somewhere between commodity and amulet.

Associated event: June 26 at 7pm / Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen in conversation with Filipa Ramos. Free entry, no booking required.

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (b. 1981, based in London) work across objects, installation and film that explore process of production as cultural, personal and political practices. They were appointed Stanely Picker Fellows in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2017. Their work was presented at The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Serpentine Cinema, London; Mu.Zee, Ostend; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Para Site, Hong Kong; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Congo International Film Festival, Goma. It is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

Call for applicants: 2019 Stanley Picker Fellowships in Art & Design  
Two Fellowhips of 16,000 GBP

Deadline: 12pm (GMT) Monday, June 17, 2019

At the heart of the Stanley Picker Gallery’s activities, the Stanley Picker Fellowship programme supports contemporary practitioners, across art and design, to research and present a significant body of new work as part of the research culture at Kingston University London. Each Fellowship provides up to 16,000 GBP and valuable access to the extensive material workshops, technical resources and expertise within Kingston School of Art and the wider University, to support a practice-based research project that will result in an exhibition of international standing at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Previous Stanley Picker Fellows include Oreet Ashery, El Ultimo Grito, Andy Holden, Onkar Kular, Michael Marriott, Elizabeth Price, Cally Spooner and Yuri Suzuki.

We are pleased to announce the selection panel for the 2019 Stanley Picker Fellowships will include Fatos Üstek, Director of Liverpool Biennial.

Visit our website for information on how to apply.

Press enquiries
stanleypickergallery@kingston.ac.uk