Night for Day
Dimensions Variable (DV) presents a solo project titled Night for Day by Lisbon, Portugal and Malmo, Sweden based artist Emily Wardill. The exhibition opens on March 11 and runs through May 7, 2022 in the Project Gallery.
Night for Day uses the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through the lens of women making the political decision to live clandestinely in Portugal for a larger part of the 20th century and if the “Last Woman” were the fem bot from The Tales of Hoffman.
Comprised of interviews conducted with Isabel do Carmo, who co-ran the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal that helped to overthrow the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe and two young men Alexander Bridi and Djelal Osman—astrophysicists running a startup in Lisbon that attempts to programme computers to recognise moving images—the film collages a subjectivity from fragments of camera’s struggling to see at night, out in the cold presences watching families inside their homes and images that attempt to describe a loved one in frequencies of three.
Their imaginary house is the real family home of the late architect António Teixeira Guerra, finished just before 1974, designed in the shape of a triangle and shot at the time he always chose to invite guests—the magic hour—when day either becomes night or night becomes day.
Roughly painted walls—a black that is a badly mixed combination of red blue and yellow—underscore the impression of a sketch that is pretending to be a finished piece just as night was pretending to be day.
Emily Wardill
Emily Wardill (*1977) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal and Malmo, Sweden. Wardill’s work has been exhibited in solo shows including Secession (2020) Kohta (2019) Bergen Kunsthall (2017), Gulbenkian Project Spaces (2017), INDEX, Stockholm (2014), The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2012); de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2012); The Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2011) List Centre MIT Boston and ICA, London (2007–08). Her work was included in group shows at Te Tuhi, New Zealand (2019), XYZ Collective, Toyko (2019) The Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva (2016), Salzburger Kunstverein (2015), the Serpentine Gallery London (2012), the Showroom Gallery London (2010), the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (2011), the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge/MA (2010), the ICA, London (2008), the Hayward Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; MUMOK Vienna; and MOCA, Miami. She has shown in the Berlinalle Forum Expanded (2021), New York and London Film festivals (2010, 2014, 2017) , Toronto Images Festival (2010) and CPHDOX (2016). Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010, the Leverhulme Award in 2011 and the EMAF Award in 2021. She participated in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and the 19th Sydney Bienalle (2014).
Some of the international collections holding Wardill’s work are Tate Britain, MUMOK Vienna, Gulbenkian Art Museum, Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Genève, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Collection, Saastamoinen Foundation and the Arts Council Collection of Great Britain as well as numerous private collections.
She is represented by Carlier Gebauer (Berlin), STANDARD(OSLO) and Altman Siegal (San Francisco).
Wardill has taught at The University of the Arts (Helsinki), University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Central Saint Martins (London), Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), School of the Art Institute (Chicago) ,National Art School (Sydney,Australia), Städelschule. (Frankfurt), Academy of Fine Arts (Karlsruhe), Goldsmiths University. (London) & the CCA (San Francisco).
Wardill currently works as a Professor at Malmo Art Academy, Sweden and as a visiting tutor at Maumaus, Lisbon.
