Helen Robertson
Echo
22 June - 27 July 2024
Private view Friday 21 June 6 - 9 pm

As a pure voice that refracts another voice. Echo makes the musicality of language sing. 
Adriana Cavarero For More Than One Voice 2005

Working with architecture and the choreographic Echo sets in motion a web of relations to women past and present, working with ideas of agency and authorship as reciprocal and interdependent. It brings together 5 films shot on video of or relating to works of architecture in which women have played an important (often unrecognised) role; this includes a film of Laura Martínez de Guereñu’s Re-enactment at the Barcelona Pavilion 2020 (that worked to bring recognition to architect Lilly Reich's design contribution); a choreography made for camera with two ballet dancers that responds to Lilly Reich and Mies van Der Rohe's Velvet and Silk Cafe and a moving image projection of a sculptural work by artist Liz Deschenes (Stereograph #36), which within the exhibition is part of a rumination on architect Lauretta Vinciarelli’s unrecognised work with Donald Judd in Marfa Texas.

Correspondences across filmed architectures and the gallery architecture are inflected by interrelated sculptural and architectural interventions giving rise to chains of iterations that extend conversations across past and present, interior and exterior, here and elsewhere.

A leaflet featuring a commissioned essay by Professor Jane Rendell will be available during the exhibition.

Helen Robertson’s work has been shown nationally and internationally including Hayward Gallery London, Stadthaus Ulm Germany, Matt’s Gallery London, Arnolfini Gallery Bristol.
Recent exhibitions include Hanging in the Balance Five Years London 2023, The Undersides of Practice APT gallery 2020, Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis Camberwell Space 2019, Come and go. Halt extreme left. Winchester Gallery, Winchester School of Art 2019, Drift Thames Side Studios Gallery, London 2019. Recent performances include its song a performance with dancer Antoinette Brooks Daw for Architectures in Air Brixton Library 2023, [these roarers] Whitstable Biennale 2018 (in collaboration with Lucy Gunning and Bernice Donszelmann), pine beech pine Architectural Association Hooke Park 2017.

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated and teaches on the MA Situated Practice, and on the MA Architectural History. She supervises history, theory and design PhDs in architecture, art, urbanism and experimental writing.
Rendell’s research, writing and pedagogic practice crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. She has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002).