“Deep inside our bodies, under 4 kilograms of skin, under 4000 miles of condensed ground and molten iron, another force is spinning backwards, from macro to micro and back, touching the core of the earth, touching the foundations of our constructed selves…
We are slowly getting out of sync”
For her second solo show at the gallery, Sarah Derat presents an immersive version of her seminal sound installation, RƎTRO/GRADƎ (premiered last year in Brussels), alongside a complex body of works spanning from wall-based silicone rubber sculptures to sound and video works. Under the banner of Two-Hearted, the transdisciplinary exhibition proposes an in-depth exploration of bodies, embracing celestial, geological, human, and technological entities as one. It explores what it means to inhabit a breathing and living body while spinning through space on a volatile rock.
The exhibition is anchored by the twin pieces RƎTRO/GRADƎ and dual-channel video Turn Heart, Turn My Heart. Inviting the audience to immerse themselves in a large seven-channel 360° surround sound installation, Derat’s delves into the complex dynamics between the Earth and its rotating core, which remains only partially understood due to its unreachable location. It is known to be a spinning solid iron mass that can move both in synchronicity and asynchronicity, faster or slower than the planet’s outer layers. Scientific data refers to the Earth’s core periodicity as a 70-year cycle before each dynamic rotational reversal.
In a strange and ominous parallel to our human lifespan, Derat uses the metaphor of the Earth and its core to delve into human experiences in an age of technological accelerationism and global instability. From macro to micro, body versus mind, personal to global, celestial to human, technological and back, RƎTRO/GRADƎ highlights tensions, convergences, friction points, and dis/harmonics between all these pulling, pushing, and rotating forces.
The work defines both a space and time where the synergy of this cross-pollination and hybridisation can take place, revealing through fault lines, cracks, and glitches the resilience and irrepressible vital energy of organic matter. While Derat’s written poetic narration is both spoken by herself and an indiscernible AI-trained custom model of her voice, the rotating sound composition is made in collaboration with her long-time collaborator, musician and composer The Radicant (aka Vincent Cavanagh). Blending sound design and field recordings (each rhythmical element made from recordings of volcanic activity), this sound piece led Derat to introduce performance as a natural extension of this production.
Seen in its fullest form, RƎTRO/GRADƎ becomes the focal point of an intense and riveting dance performance choreographed by Georgia Tegou and danced by Synne Maria Lundesgaard. Following Derat’s vision of rotational instability, the performance captures synchronised and asynchronised motions, the loss of balance, the rupture of a body—which split at the core—constantly moving on and off axis.
Some striking movements of the choreography are captured in Derat’s video work Turn Heart, Turn My Heart, the uncanniness of the limb positions and contortions of the performer leave you with a sense of otherworldliness. Filmed synchronously in London and Hawaii, the two-channel projection also displays footage from the United States Geological Survey monitoring of the shield volcano Kilauea. Derat mentions watching the live stream of Kilauea’s 2023 eruption daily as a long-time companion accompanying her through the process of making her new body of work. In a reference to the exhibition’s title, Two-Hearted, the artist records identical moments in which both Lundesgaard’s body and Kilauea breathe and summon one another, leaving the audience to contemplate the physical parallels between both actors in this work. The fluidity of two-hearted bodies and states of being conveys a powerful expression of intimacy, in which sound, video, installation, and silicone sculptures are to be lived and felt as a haptic and corporeal experience.
In a flickering dance between presence and absence, the artist continues to explore the physical envelope of human bodies throughout the works and spaces.
In the South Gallery, Derat hints at human presence using her signature sculptural material, silicone rubber. The tactile and skin-like synthetic nature of the material imitates the body, becoming a wearable garment for Synne Maria Lundesgaard in Heartfelt, while the monolithic Idle Nerve anchors the room. Depicting the volcanic crater of Nisyros Island (Greece) and overlaid with the first line of RƎTRO/GRADƎ, the work is a poetic warning, evoking a moment of stillness before action.
Derat describes this piece as both reminiscent of AI/automation as a watcher, ingesting all data we voluntarily or involuntarily put out to simulate (mirror) our organic processes, and an evocation of the predatorial nature of some organisms and animals, which go through states of idleness to capture their prey.
The only realistic—if yet to be defined—experience of the body finds its place in I Swallowed The Sun. The small video shows the zoomed-in medical footage of an eye sparkled with constellation-like crystals, turning the entire eyeball into a shimmering planet.
In the orange room, Derat proposes an intense yet intimate experience of sound and image as touch. We experience Izbrannaya, the sound installation of two lung-like speakers playing a recording of Synne Maria Lundesgaard’s performance of RƎTRO/GRADƎ in dead silence. Recorded with multiple mics on the dancer’s body, floor, around, and above her, Izbrannaya offers both a sensual and intense experience of a body that, in its absence, still manages to convey physical endurance, effort, and resistance. The title of this piece references the lead character in Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), in which the “Izbrannaya” (Russian for “Chosen One”) is selected to dance to death as a sacrificial offering to ensure the arrival of spring.
In contrast with the eloquent yet non-verbal Izbrannaya, Derat presents You Until You’re Not; a short silent video on a surtitle monitor. Commonly used in live theatre performances to provide the audience with a transcript of the audio and additional cues, the artist uses its unusual 16:3 aspect ratio to display the transcript of an audio recording we do not hear. The artist’s poem intermittently appears: short lines inking the surface of constantly moving skin like tattoos. Filmed by the artist in a steady macro shot, the pores, cracks, and scars of the skin mirror the fissures and fault lines of the Earth. As Legacy Russell writes in Glitch Feminism, “A break, a tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.”
As a final act, returning to the theme of presence/absence, the centre circle where RƎTRO/GRADƎ was performed on the opening day of the exhibition now bears the indelible marks of Lundesgaard’s motions.
As the artist suggests at the end of her sound installation, “We are volcanoes, broken pieces of fire cascading down, catching up to the speed of sound. Listen, what is broken can be fused again.” we are traces, ourselves left and dispersed around the space of the gallery. This glitching, this sliding and slipping of our states, emphasises once again the fluidity of our nature, stretched across physical and digital embodiments.
Sarah Derat was born in Paris in 1984 and now lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include A Wounded Matrix, EinaIdea/CulturaUPV, Valencia (2024); MIART, Milan (2024); RETRO/GRADE, Super Dakota, Brussels (2023); Sónar+D, Barcelona (2021); Liste Showtime, Liste Art Fair, Basel (2020); I’m verses, Super Dakota, Brussels (2020); She Who Loves Silence, Castor, London (2019).