7 March – 15 April 2007
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.
Originally from Jerusalem, Israel, Pil and Galia Kollectiv moved to London to study on the Goldsmiths MA course. The couple work collaboratively as artists, writers, independent curators and lecturers: in London they have curated and been involved in a number of group projects including Modern Lovers at Three Colts Gallery, Turn to the Left at 291 Gallery and Diamonds for Workers at Kate MacGarry.
Les Georges Leningrad are Montréal's preeminent art-punks, blending dub, disco, post-punk and no-wave to create an aesthetic form that demolishes the lines between music presentation and promotion.
Conway Hall is a landmark of London's independent intellectual, political and cultural life. It is home to the Ethical Society, where it fosters freedom in moral and spiritual life and thought.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv: Aspargus: A Horticultural Ballet, 2007.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv: Aspargus: A Horticultural Ballet, 2007.