Picture Window (Sonica) | Johanna Billing and Joanna Peace
Market Gallery are delighted to invite you to Picture Window’s programme of contemporary video art for Sonica 2015. Transforming the windows into screens the work of Johanna Billing and Joanna Peace is presented, which use and examine music and song in innovative and original ways.
Projections from 5pm until 8pm daily, 29th October – 8th November
Gallery 2: Joanna Peace
Gallery 3: Johanna Billing
Please join us at Market Gallery for our closing reception on Friday 6th November 7-9PM
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Joanna Peace has created a new moving image work for Sonica 2015 titled All that noise coming in. You have to make music of it somehow, that has emerged from the emotional and politicising experience of living in Athens through June and July 2015. Joanna has collaborated with artist Jessica Argo on a soundtrack for the work.
On one of my first days in the city I find the words I DREAM AS BADLY AS I TAG scribbled on the back of a toilet door. How can you dream badly? I remember thinking. Does it mean you have bad dreams, like the nightmare I had when I was five about Beetlejuice drilling a hole in my hand. Or does it mean that you are bad at dreaming?
During the hot unsettled months of that summer I have many vivid dreams. Certain themes keep recurring, I note in my diary. Water, crowds, journeys. All very emotional. I write. I suppose it was my brain’s way of processing all that extra information.
On one of my last days in the city we make a special trip to the record shop tucked behind our favourite café, stacked floor to ceiling with records and out-dated equipment, where the owner sits, god-like, enthroned behind a wide desk, his attendants the smiling faces of long-dead singers stuck to the wall.
He sells me a record featuring Marika Ninou, one of the most famous singers of her day. It is a rare live recording from Fat Jimmy’s in 1955, and you can hear the sounds of passing motorbikes and jokes from the crowd.
As I place the needle on the record, time and space are flattened. Or maybe not flattened, rather, rationalised, into one unfolding present, as dreams can do. The past and present and a potential future all right now and I can feel it, as her voice passes straight through my ears and into my heart.
The front cover of the record features Marika Ninou smiling, surrounded by a painted wreath of red and orange flowers. I turn it over and I read from the back that:
“In 1955 we are in a period when dreams and expectations struggle to come on the surface and governments are formed and collapse in a strange atmosphere of tremendous discoveries and peculiar alliances.
A successful programme is composed with exoticism, moral lessons, rememorations, cries, desires, Turkish songs and recent hits … in that transitional period, where songs were a social contact, a joyful opening to the world, a healthy search of pleasure.”
Joanna Peace (b. 1982, UK) is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. Recent projects include the performative talk At least some sentiments were expressed, if not all, with Serra Tansel, CCA, Glasgow, 2015; the exhibition GLYKIA MOU, Snehta, Athens, 2015; The Writing Group, a mobile support group, ongoing; and HOUSE VISIT, a residency in The Hague funded by the a-n New Collaborations Bursary, 2014.
Published writing includes UNLIMITED, commissioned for the upcoming exhibition Sera Tansel Unlimited at noshowspace, London, 2015; the short stories Broken Waters / Honey Steps, published Athens, 2015; Universe of Women, commissioned for the exhibition Concrete Ribs, Govanhill Baths, Glasgow, 2015; and Lover of Rock published by MAP, 2015.
Joanna is a Visiting Lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and works with organisations including My Bookcase, Project Ability and the Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
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Picture Window will present two of Johanna Billing’s best known works; Magical World, 2005 at Market Gallery and I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm, 2009 at Bakery 47. These works exemplify Johanna’s interest in performance and music’s role within society.
Johanna Billing was born in 1973 in Jönkoping, Sweden. She attended Konstfack, International College of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm where she has lived and worked with video, film and performance since graduating in 1999. Recent major solo exhibitions include I’m Gonna Live Anyhow until I Die, The Mac, Belfast (2012), I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm, Modern Art Oxford, Moving In, Five films, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, (2010), I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm, Camden Art Centre (2009). She has participated in survey shows such as 4th Auckland Triennial (2010), Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Singapore Biennale (2006), 9th Istanbul Biennial; 1st Moscow Biennale (2005) and 50th Venice Biennale (2003). From 1998 until 2010 Johanna also ran the Make it Happen record label with her brother Anders, publishing music and arranging live performances.
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