Keeping Time with the Unrest

Exhibition with Katharina Cameron at Zalukcy Contemporary
Toronto, Canada

17 June — 15 July 2023

Keeping Time with the Unrest is an exhibition of works by Berlin-based artist Katharina Cameron and Lili Huston-Herterich. I organized the exhibition, and my work is a continuation in form and subject of my mother Meg Huston's artistic practice: my mother first introduced me both to puppetmaking, and the story of Stravinksy's Le Sacre du Printemps (via Pina Bausch). My invitation to Katharina Cameron is an extension of ongoing conversations with her on life and practice.

Exhibiton Text:

The exhibition includes a series of phogoraphs of ceramic puppets who comprise the cast of The Sack Hold You, Panter, a narrative video work using a rewritten version of Igor Stravinski's ballet Le Sacre Du Printemps. In the ballet's original story, a gendered working body is sacrificed in response to a climate crisis. In my version, the dance of the sacrificed victims shifts to a chosen and collective act of perpetual movement without exploitation – not a deadly dance but a never-ending one, a loop that does not begin or end at the same place (a process that is never final).

This temporal looping is echoed in Katharina Cameron's cut-collages of watch advertisements, which conjure patriarchal megalomania and the futile quest to conquer time through linearity and inheritance. The cutting patterns are reminiscent of German Christmas star window hangings that the artist used to make with her family. The centre point of the star becomes the centre point of the watch face, connecting the measurement of time with the birth of Jesus Christ as its retroactive starting point. These works accompany Cameron's stink bottles, an indefinite series of digital images made in collaboration with DALL·E (an AI text-to-image generator) of perfume bottles that hold invisible, intoxicating, and unknowable things.

Taken together, the works in Keeping Time With The Unrest leave a trace: the puppets create and hold an imagined space of collective transformation, the mechanical "unrest" (unruh) of each cut watch questions the agenda of measured time, and the vessels shift and transform through their iterations. The constellation of images and the parade of characters contained therein make revision, repetition, and rehearsal visible.

-Lili Huston-Herterich