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After Joyce…

With the project IN-EXTREMIS 1999 – o Estado da(s) Arte(s) no final da década, do

século e do milénio (the state of the arts at the end of the decade, the century, the

Millenium) Galeria Luis Serpa aims to stimulate a debate about globalisation

and the interdisciplinary approach that increasingly characterises our particular

cultural moment. Narelle Jubelin is an Australian artist, resident in Madrid,

now fairly well known in Lisbon too: her work was included in the exhibition

Depois de Amanhã (After Tomorrow) as part of Lisboa ’94, and her elegant andthoughtful one-person show, Ecru , was shown this year at the Pavilhão Branco

in Lisbon as part of the Trading Images series of exhibitions. In ways that

integrate a high degree of conceptualisation with a pristine visual sensibility,

 Jubelin’s work deals with the paradoxes that emerge from the notion of 

‘cultural exchange’. Turning a critical eye towards colonial history, she has

elaborated a methodology that involves close research and minutely detailed

execution, frequently using writing (script and text) and fabric (weaving and

unravelling) as metaphors for each other. Ways of telling – in other words

versions of narratives – are examined as fundamentally bound up with

particular histories. Translation is, in her work, a multi-layered, vexed concept.

In the present exhibition, Jubelin does not disappoint us: the show has the

crispness we now associate with her work, an elegance often at odds with its

critical content. Here we see Jubelin’s collaboration with Japanese artist Satoru

Itazu. The work was made during Jubelin’s recent sojourn in Japan. The artistsuse the traditional Japanese methods of paper making: three scrolls in Tosa

paper with Yajagi-zome dying, and borders made from silk kimonos. These

scrolls are eventually held in three beautifully made wooden boxes. But the

work produced splices together notions of east and west by focussing on two

particular traditions – an oriental manual craft and a western intellectual craft,

that of writing.

Basing their collaboration on Molly Bloom’s life-affirming monologue at the

end of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the artists explore the mythological figure of 

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Penelope who inspired Joyce: Penelope who wove and unravelled while

waiting for her husband Ulysses to return from his odyssey. As a supreme

example of a male writer using a female voice (one form of translation), Joyce’s

text serves as the point of departure for this work of ‘translation’. The artists

 base the weaving and unravelling of their work on annotated manuscripts of 

 Joyce. Translated into Japanese, Molly Bloom/Penelope’s monologue is

subjected to an act of both transcription and erasure, materialising the fluidity

of meaning as it passes from one site to another. The public is invited to sit on

long metal benches, exquisitely designed, and to handle the scrolls, rolling and

unrolling them, so that reading becomes not only an intellectual experience, butalso a bodily one.

Ruth Rosengarten

Narelle Jubelin and Satoru Itazu

As part of series of exhibitions IN-EXTREMIS 1999 – o Estado da(s) Arte(s) no

 final da década, do século e do milénio , Galeria Luis Serpa, Lisbon.

Published in Visão , 24 June 1999.