Pil and Galia Kollectiv: Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet

Pil and Galia Kollectiv work across a number of disciplines, but their primary medium is film and video. For The Showroom they present a gallery-based exhibition launched by a special one-off performance of* Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet* at Conway Hall, featuring live music by the acclaimed Les Georges Leningrad from Montréal.

Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet is a live performance piece inspired by rumour and myth. In the late 1970s, while still a student, Waw Pierogi, later of an obscure New Jersey minimal synth band xex, composed the interdisciplinary Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet. No documentation of the piece exists, but Pil and Galia Kollectiv had become fascinated by this work, alongside another lost work, Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet. The Kollectivs' desire was not to recreate either, but rather they were intrigued by the possibilities of making a new work through the collision of ideas left behind by former art movements and other cultural phenomena. For them unrealised, forgotten and failed revolutions were as much a legacy of modernism as the utopian belief in progress that we have inherited.