The Collection: Victoria Miro & Siobhan Davies Dance

The Collection - Victoria Miro & Siobhan Davies Dance
24 March – 9 April 2009

by Laura McLean-Ferris

The border at which contemporary art and dance meet is a membrane so thin that it occasionally appears invisible, as artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham, to name a couple of the most famous, have shown. Victoria Miro and Siobhan Davies have collaboratively embarked on a programme in which they hope to stretch that border thin once more, sharing artists, dancers, spaces and studios. Conrad Shawcross has created a new installation for Siobhan Davies impressive studios near Elephant and Castle, whilst dancers from the studio are currently performing a six-hour-long dance piece Minutes at Victoria Miro Gallery during the exhibition, as part of a group exhibition that explores dance, movement, and bodies in space.

The most collaborative piece at Victoria Miro is Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop’s Lying in Wait (2009), Khan’s monochrome film installation of sombrely and heavily dressed dancer Warsop in a library making sheathing movements with open white palms, which appear like pages being opened and torn. Khan overlays several of the dancer's movements in his signature style, and the multiple layers of movement that spring from the dancer’s body bring to mind a relationship between opening pages and breathing lungs, as well as the potential interior worlds and movements that lie in the books on the shelves. The rest of the show is deftly curated with a light touch (or should that be a light step?), including a new film from Alex Hartley, Sarah Sze’s Notes on a Circumstance (2007) - a small corner of bricolage bric-a-brac in which wires, lines and coloured fluff seem to trace tiny steps - and Francis Alÿs's pale and flat little pair of paintings, Untitled (Musical Chair) (2006) in which two figures, one male, one female, appear to walk endlessly around the same chair.

Lying in Wait by Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop. Photo Sam Collins