VIVID is delighted to announce details of Inbindable Volume, an ambitious new multi-screen video installation by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry.
The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior which unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots. The concrete physicality of the architecture is sensuously rendered against the unseen imagined spaces alluded to within the books held in the space; drawing a parallel, perhaps, to Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel in which the author imagines an infinite number of hexagonal libraries containing books with every possible ordering of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.
The rhythm and texture of the film is driven by the voice of an omnipresent narrator, who describes the lifespan of a building from conception to abandonment - through a text which skips unsettlingly between past, present and future tense. The elements of the work conspire to generate multiple perspectives in time and space creating a state of flux between continual movement, and a sense of security engendered by the narrator's formal and reassuring tone.
Filmed in Birmingham's iconic Central Library, the city's most infamous example of Brutalist architecture, Inbindable Volume is an exploration of the journey between conception and materialization - both in architecture and books - and what becomes of ideologies after they have been realised in material form.
Launching VIVID's 2010/11 artists commissioning programme, the work has been developed during a three month residency at VIVID's project space in Eastside with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation, Birmingham City of Culture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie, an institute for research and production in the fields of fine art, design and theory in the Netherlands.
Following the residency and exhibition at VIVID, from 29 July – 21 August 2010, Inbindable Volume and additional new works, commissioned with our touring partners, will tour to Danielle Arnaud, London (17 September to 24 October 2010), Galleri Box, Gothenburg, Sweden (04 March - 03 April 2011) and ArtSway, Hampshire (16 April - 12 June 2011).