The National, Carriageworks, Sydney

A Constructed World (ACW) is the collaborative project of two artists – Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva. Based in Paris they are unable to be physically present at Carriageworks for The National 2021. But ACW will nevertheless be very much present – in image, text, archive and performance. In the bodies and voices of others. In how they gather in and move through the space, conscious agents within the work as well as less suspecting audiences, all participants alike.

The installation – Partition #13, Ass Assembly / Assemblée des culs – is both an archive composed of all the above forms (image, text, performance etc) but most of all of ideas emitted in communicative acts, itself a situation occasioning an evolving set of performances. Assemblée des culs is an installation and performance work that first took place in Paris in 2017 and is reprised here for The National. The ground of the work is a large section of gallery wall painted green-screen green. This is a colour used as a chroma-key backdrop for live action filming, effectively holding space for a scene to be layered into the image. Across this wall is displayed an accumulation of elements. There is a prominent painting of buttocks and arseholes – a celebration of the body’s abject counterbalance to reason, knowledge and language. There is a monitor for video performances and a table in front of the wall that highlights the installation’s character as a setting – and a set – for ongoing performance. The work is an accumulation, but also a careful selection of archival material that acts simultaneously as document, art object and score. An archive generated by and pertaining to its prior iteration in 2017, it is also a sourcebook of sorts for new interactions and performances. This cycling of ideas and forms is emphasised by a painted plan for the wall installation that has been incorporated into the display by the artists.

– Blair French