Corporeal Punishment: The Body of Evidence Lies Naked and Bruised
curated by Abina Manning, Chicago
Friday, March 7 at the Cultural Center 8:30pm
Sunday, March 9 at Discount Cinema 5:00pm

"They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind."
  —Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

These pieces share a relentless, and often perverse, inquisitive purpose, a keen engagement with the "what ifs?" Through various approaches - performance, fictional re-enactment, real-time interrogation, and the use of a tentative humour - the artists engage bodies of evidence, literal and metaphorical, to interrogate the given. Their subjects - war, a serial killer, the place of the artist in society, a plastic conundrum - are examined with an aberrant yet unwavering eye, seeking out what lies beneath. The "what-ifs?" are not only proposed, they are acted out to bloody climax. Central to this program is the quest of the individual to understand what we can know of the world, what we can believe about the world, and how we can talk about it.

In Frozen War, UK artist John Smith, holed up in a hotel room far from home, turns the tables on the TV news as he starts to ask the questions they never do. Hailed as, "the biggest wake-up call of the 2002 California Biennial" by Frieze magazine, Joe Sola in St Henry Composition literally wants to know how the artist will hold up to his critics. A prodigious project that ponders the dark psyches of the Bush administration, Paul Chan's RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war as the team engage each other and the "enemy". Kathy High acts out her long-held fear of dying in the year 2000 to morbid yet delightful effect in Death Poses. Steve Reinke's The Chocolate Factory is an unsettling suite of monologues in the voice of a fictionalized serial killer, one monologue for each victim. In After Wegman, Anne McGuire slyly discovers the instincts that really drive those puppies' desires. Sterling Ruby won't leave well alone, but rather decides to force the issue. Forced Inanimate Connection: Climax Modeling, highlights a painful process, yet the end-result brings satisfaction.

John Smith Frozen War 11:00
Joe Sola St Henry Composition 5:17
Paul Chan Re:The_Operation 28:00
Kathy High Death Poses 3:30 2002 (excerpt from Everyday Problems Of The Living)
Steve Reinke The Chocolate Factory 26:00
Anne McGuire After Wegman 3:30
Sterling Ruby Forced Inanimate Connection: Climax Modelling 6:42

Abina Manning is Associate Director at the Video Data Bank in Chicago, the largest distributor of artists' video in the U.S. Originally from London, she has a long established history in the promotion, distribution and exhibition of artists' film, video and installation work through her work with many of London's premier arts organizations, including the Lux Centre, London Electronic Arts, the London Film Makers Co-op, Cinema of Women and the Arts Council of England. She directed the Pandæmonium Festival, London's biennial festival of the moving image, a showcase for international contemporary artists' installation, single screen and new media work, held at the Institute for Contemporary Art.
Abina has participated in numerous international film and video festivals and exhibitions, as a jury and panel member, program curator and advisor, and has collaborated with major art venues such as the Tate Modern, and the Whitechapel and Serpentine Galleries in London on exhibition events. Since relocating to the U.S. in 1999, she has curated several video and installation exhibitions and programs, including the Butcher Shop Gallery and the Transmissions Festival of Electronic Sound and Image in Chicago, the Virginia Film Festival, the Dallas Film and Video Festival, CalArts and the Art Institute of Chicago.