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The Unnamable20 April28 May 2006

Opening hours: WednesdaySunday, 16pm

With a nod to Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable consists of three short shows loosely themed around

the notion of gaps in language and experience: the primval stratum to everyday existence, the back-

ground hum of subjective states which never quite break through into the world of speech, commerce

and common sense. This inchoate stream of velleities and half-fleshed fantasies can be unspeakably

trivial, or unutterably disturbing.

The video works presented in the exhibition each, in their different ways, evoke these

subliminal states. Sebastian Buerkners The Conversation involves an ongoing attempt to develop

visual dictionaries, a shadow language of images which are associated with particular sounds or

words, but which gradually take on a life of their own. Laure ProuvostsAbstractions Quotidiennes are

synaesthetic stories in which abject details, examined in tactile close-up, give rise to elaborate and

macabre fictions. Duncan Campbells Falls Burns Malone Fiddles examines a series of photographs

from a Belfast community archive, as the narrator questions not only his own position as observer but

his very existence.

The Unnamable is the first collaboration between Lounge and LUX. The exhibition

consists of three two-week solo gallery shows, presenting works which have not been exhibited in

London before.

ALounge/LUX project

Lounge,

28 Shacklewell Lane,

London E8

www.lounge-gallery.com

www.lux.org.uk/theunnamable

Sebastian Buerkner2030 April 2006

Private view: Wednesday 19 April, 69pm

Sebastian Buerkners The Conversation (2006) takes the form of three Micromedia Flash animations

projected simultaneously, in portrait format, on separate screens. They document a conversation

between three individuals represented by actors voices. Like an exercise in Freudian free association

the apparently inconsequential discussion is accompanied by images that provide the viewer with

brief glimpses into the subconscious of the protagonists. Buerkner has created a series of vignettes,

animated pictograms, that accompany each and every spoken word. These moving images are

individual to each speaker and reveal something of their lives as they form chains of associated

imagery. So, for example, as one character uses the word thinkinga black and white graphic appears

on screen that resembles some kind of yin and yang pattern or a computer rendering icon. The word

far, used by another protagonist, is accompanied by the sight of an airplane passing far overhead;

loveby a couple embarrassing one another in front of a stylized sunset (recalling the graphics found

on a packet of contraceptives); believeby the sight of a church minister juggling a three dimensional

Band hope by a shooting star. Buerkners work brings to mind the statement by Guy Debord in The

Society of Spectacle (1967) that all that was once directly lived has become mere representation. Our

most intimate and profound thoughts have had superficial iconographies imposed upon them by the

mass media. Buerkner remixes these iconographies to create a surreal standoff.

The Conversation follows three earlier works including Walker (2005). This work, presented on a

single screen, records the activity of a drifter or flneur variously lying in bed at night, smoking a

cigarette and driving a car. The character is barely seen but is represented by fleeting (to the point of

being almost subliminal) images and symbols of ideas and memories that pass through t heir mind.

The imagery is ambiguous and the viewer is left to draw their own interpretation of these daydreams.The flat imagery employed by Buerkner is clichd but realised with a very particular, illustrative

style that hints at his t raining as a painter. His visual vocabulary appears to draw inspiration from a

wide variety of sources including graphics from the GDR (where he grew up), from evangelical posters

outside so-called charismatic churches, magic eye posters, the primary forms of Modernism and cheap

interior design from twenty years ago. Dissatisfied with the limitations of painting and eager to take

full control of every aspect of the production and dissemination of his work, in 2004, Buerkner

abandoned painting, at least with traditional media, to work with Flash - a multimedia graphics

program primarily used for website design. He describes how with Flash he can make and distribute

his work from a desktop computer (following the lead of electronic musicians who, from the late

1980s, made and distributed their activity from home). Flash allows Buerkner to work not just as a

painter, but as a sculptor, a director, an actor, a product designer, etc. Also, by creating digital works

and reinventing existing, almost archetypal, vocabularies, Buerkner can be seen to be working in

something of a conceptual tradition following Douglas Heublers statement of 1969: The world is full

of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

Rob Tufnell

Sebastian Buerkner was born in Berlin in 1975. He studied Fine Art, at University of Halle/Saale in

Germany and Chelsea College in London. Having initially worked in sculpture, he has recently begun

to work with Flash animation. His video work has been included in a number of shows, including

Pilot 2, London (2005) and Centre of Attention at the Rio, London (2005), and he has recently been

commissioned to make a film for broadcast on Channel 4 by animate! (www.animateonline.org).

He lives and works in London.

www.sebastianbuerkner.com

Posterimage:LaureProuvost

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