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characters in search of an exit sees topologies of division articulated through the organising forms and devices of language. Populated by interruptions and iterations, the works are discursive of strategies with which to navigate spaces of separation. Experiencing space as syntax, the artist is frequently apparent as translator or editor. There is a sense of incompleteness given over to the exhibition through its works (a poster for a film not yet made, a scene’s script extracted from a film, a single second of video in unremitting repetition) which are sited at a point of transposition or becoming. characters in search of an exit contends to make visible, through their varied exhibitional forms, the different surfaces of the works’ disruptions, transmissions and interactions within spaces and to bring these into dialogue through shifting sets of associations.

Beatrice Gibson operates through collective forms of production, in particular to consider how such modes can articulate a place or history. Through the use of graphic scores and musical logics to organize her materials, Gibson potentialises their democratic effects. Her works are edited from the utterances which form place. The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us Scene 4 (2010) is in itself a further edit, a single example of a total eight typeset pages or scenes. These scenes score the titular film they are derived from, working to construct a landscape of (verbatim) transcriptions from discussions held between the artist and the residents of four Camden elderly people’s homes. Both a document of and object which is featured within the film, The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest of Us Scene 4 is a further distribution and deferral of its content; another layer of distancing and fictionalisation. Eliding the differences between the textual and the aural, the work is a move in form from listening to reading.

Mircea Cantor’s practice broadly seeks to negate the transparency and predictability of contemporary society; offering critiques that are both oblique and indefinite, Cantor acts as interlocutor between the conflating areas of knowledge his works bring together, suggesting multi-layered narratives which might resist co-option via their equivocations. Cantor’s Vertical Attempt (2009), enacts an interruption within the everyday. The looped video, lasting only one second, records a child sat on the edge of a sink ‘cutting’ the flow of water coming from the tap. The spaces of ‘pause’, the black outs between each iteration of the video, organize the work in a syntactical manner. While the gesture is improbably simple, edited to terminate at the exact moment of the action’s completion, Cantor instigates a suspension of time which attempts to apprehend an impossible moment. The film’s structure, contingent to the exact parameters of its action, frames the work as an almost sculptural intervention within the gallery space.

Mauricio Guillén is concerned with invisible borders and instruments of division. Within his photographs, films and installations, Guillén works to open up discourses which move beyond monumental narratives to produce manifold interpretations. Materials are deployed to displace singular positions, interrogating the politics of the visual to understand how they influence our understanding of culture and history. Platkat No.1 is a poster for a yet to be made film by the artist; an anticipatory dissemination, it is a visual mechanism which conflates the work still to be done in the (private) studio, and the realm of the public. The poster ‘scores’ the film shot by shot; photographing Mexico City, his actions take on the form of a derivé, traversing the city via impulses affected by the directive signs. Taking us from Lafontaine to Lord Byron to Tolstoy, Guillén adopts official language to compose alternative narratives which question the politics of memory and class. Authoring the city-as-text, the disordered sequences of names which appear see Guillén re-writing the toponymic landscape to appropriate the systems which organize the city and produce new geographies.

Ric Warren works to expose political, cultural and physical boundaries within public space. Drawing on the man-made materials which contrive our traversal of the cityscape, Warren’s structures affect to conceal, edit, or corral. Echoing the constant transitions and adjustments of the city, his works distort functionality by exploiting formal traditions of architecture to annex space rather than create it. In City Wall: Constant Shifts (Batons 1-12) (2011), the installation becomes an act of co-option within the exhibition space – a form of architecture that is built to occupy, not to be occupied. The work’s modularity allows it to be expanded or redacted dependent of the given space and permits potential privatization, seizure, and internment, as both reactive installation and autonomous sculpture. The forward slash symbol, carried through in Enclave (2011), further becomes a typographic and grammatical tool with which to reference pacings and divisions in both public space and that of the gallery.

Amalia Pica’s work is engaged with civic participation, public space and movements within political and social systems. Theatrical interventions on monuments and buildings seek to enact narratives taken from books and oral culture. Markedly, sites of declaration or public speech delineate Pica’s engagement with the performative, apprehending extant spaces which might become galvanised by gatherings or speech acts. In Babble, Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada Yada Yada, (2010) the artist stands in a deserted landscape, spelling out the title sentence using brightly coloured semaphore flags through a projected sequence of slides. Through this labour of gesture, each iteration framed by a slide, Pica expounds the anachronistic devices of her appropriated system through her method of presentation. Through performative enunciation the artist enacts a space of contact between herself and the audience. Yet Pica’s message is strangely uncertain or inarticulate- while the work is discursive about discourse, it has little to say, a hollow dispatch.

In a networked, mobile society location has long been liberated from geography as our forms of communication and ways of narrating spaces have similarly quickened in pace, collapsing geographies and distances. Spaces become both accelerated and condensed. Through their various cuts, disruptions, interrupted and uncertain transmissions, conceivably the works in characters in search of an exit examine this acceleration and suggest the need for an interlude, or perhaps, an exit.

curated by Nicola Celia Wright