Archive
2021
KubaParis
Like clock







Location
David Dale GalleryDate
10.06 –16.07.2021Photography
Max SlavenSubheadline
presented for Glasgow International festival 2021Text
Like clock
Dan Walwin
11.06 - 17.07.21
David Dale Gallery
4K video, 19 minutes, sound & synchronized HD projection
There are dummies on low gibbets, set up for the soldiers to rip with their bayonets.
There is an engine in a house, all locked, that hums and whirrs everlastingly. High up
on the hill was a frilly thin girl and a baby in scarlet.
The buzz of all the insects is like a distant echo of the power-house.
“The trouble with my fantasy life is it’s like a dammed-up stream. If it’s blocked one
way, it will just trickle out another, and soon be flowing freely and happily again. When
I am dammed and I will not force and break the dam, will not bore through it and will
not make the waters flow in however rough a channel, I am not happy.”
Red button becomes retrieval scheme. “But its gaiety was like the deafening voice;
merciless, made of tin, and mad.” There may [question] be time for the clock, the clock
[question] may make time for itself;
Like clock is a work made up of multiple borrowed and familiar aspects, assembled
on its own terms. The essential premise would seem to be about staging a gathering together
in a place that appears to have its own rules.
It takes much inspiration from thinking about the mechanics of staging exhibitions
and films, and considering what they both have in common through their means of
sharing. Arranged here within video(s), they varyingly test their registers and effects.
Through this provisional set of procedures, a cycle of breakdowns and renewals is set
in motion. The desires and impulses embodied within accumulate over time to create
a machine-dream scenario, as if glimpsing behind-the-scenes during construction.
Dan Walwin creates works that attend closely to the observed patterns and rhythms
of their subjects, as ways of finding keys to their operating logic. These function by
combining video, sound and sculpture to channel visceral sensation, playing with the
scale and dissonance of forces and forms.
Dan Walwin (b.1986, Frome, UK) lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent solo
exhibitions and screenings include True place, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Prague;
Enclosures and Desertion (screening), Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bridge with
sound, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes as part of the 6th Rennes Biennale. Walwin
has also presented exhibitions and screenings at Frans Hals Museum – Hal, KM21
Den Haag, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Cell Project Space, South London Gallery, Wexner
Center for the Arts, LIMA, P/////AKT, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Supported by Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, the Embassy of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands and Creative Scotland. Selected for and supported by
Glasgow International Across the City.