Beatrice Gibson at Camden Arts Centre, London
Camden Arts Centre, London January 18 – March 31
“I wanted to put all these voices in one frame for you, so that one day if needed you could use them to unwrite whoever it is you’re told you’re supposed to be.” Beatrice Gibson’s voiceover in I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) is broken, a soft teetering sigh superimposed on the closely knit fabric of the film. Doused in a Caravaggio color scheme, she quotes fragments from Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Alice Notley, all as part of an imaginary love letter to her daughter’s future. A bitter yet deeply cleansing confession that evokes some of the most memorable, self-lacerating and insidious monologues of Bergman’s films. Featuring music by Pauline Oliveros and readings by two of the most radical American poets, CAConrad and Eileen Myles, the film deftly weaves narratives of ruin and reassurance, upheaval and intimacy. For her solo show “Crone Music” at the Camden Arts Centre, until March 31, she presents two films and an expanded public program aimed at validating her voice within an overtly feminist discourse, intended as a means to critically eschew cultural “superstructures” and outdated aesthetics: “I like beautiful, emotional things, and I think they can be made critically,” Gibson claims. A statement that immediately brings us back to a theory of cultural politics within a feminist discourse, one that postulates emotions as integral to the legitimation of power relations. The same political engagement carries over in another film, Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs (2018), loosely based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay and written in 1929 as fascism was increasingly spreading across Europe. More a method than a subject, feminism allows Gibson to reflect on today’s world while also casting her characters from a close network of friends and practitioners who have greatly influenced her artistic career. Inclusiveness and participation thus become the uncanny bids to navigate friendship, empathy and feeling as harbors to resort to in an age of cultural unrest. It is not possible to say what impression her films make on us. There is something inexpressibly beautiful about them and at the same time fiendish. Beauty with an evil sign, as if an element of chaos and turmoil was engrained in them to counter non-viable quixotic views of the future. It is not possible to catch the moment at which the apocalyptic goes over into the intimate, or catastrophic dystopias give way to more private footage of the artist’s life. I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead and Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs convey a sense of swelling anxiety and impending threat, filtered through and ideally healed by the experiences of motherhood and poetry.