James Coleman

Throughout his creative career, James Coleman (Ireland, 1941) has dealt with questions such as reality, perception, representation and the construction of the image and identity.

He approaches those subjects with works produced with a tangential use of video, film, slides, theatre or performance. His installations are presented as stagings where the spectator-observer finds himself trapped in a net of tensions and impacts. With great subtlety, James Coleman manages to disturb the registers and habits of the eye and ear and to free, beyond the threshold of the images, a restless phantasmagoria which makes them new, unknown, magical. They are no longer projections; they are not imprints or traces; they are realities, existences that occur in time, between forgetfulness and memory.

Coleman links the mystery of fiction with material and historic elements of everyday life. Thus his works mix allusions to real situations, literary genres like theatre and Irish folklore and pastiches taken from popular culture. All those elements are combined with images that refer indirectly to traditional painting, fashion photography and music culture. This, therefore is a complex, committed creation that suggests a coded political and social message.

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies presents a new piece together with a retrospective overview of his work: Fly, 1970, b&w 16mm film, looped continous projection, silent; Pump, 1972, b&w 16 mm film, silent; Playback of a Daydream, 1974, b&w 16 mm film, continuous cycle; Clara and Dario, 1975, projected images with synchronized audio narration; La Tache Aveugle, 1978-90, projected images; So Different… and Yet, 1980, colour video installation; Connemara Landscape, 1980, projected image, continuous, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, projected images with synchronized audio narration.

The new work that Coleman has created for the exhibition, Photograph, 1998-99, is being produced by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, jointly by the Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. The work consists of a multiple projection of synchronised slide images with narrator’s voice-off. The photographic images document a mise en scène which takes place in and around the rehearsal hall of a community school where a group of young actors and dancers re-enact dance routines and dramatised scenes for a school project in stages of rehearsals.

On this occasion, a catalogue will be published with texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rosalind E. Krauss and Jean-Christophe Royoux.