Ahold of Get the Things To – Daniel Jacoby

23.01 – 08.03/ 2014
Galerie Antoine Levi, Paris

Ahold of Get the Things To takes as its starting point a certain structural elasticity, disclosing something about a narrative’s ability to change and adapt according to its environment. For the exhibition, the viewer is made sensitive to this through the dislocation of the actual space of exhibition from the gallery to the office. Reinventing itself as a projection room, the office is displaced into the gallery, assuming space for its daily practicalities, yet simultaneously, creating new parameters for a viewer’s experience of the gallery as a whole. Albeit a practical solution, a way of accommodating the film presented by Jacoby, this inversion brings the viewer into direct contact with the structural and figurative eclecticism underlying each of the works found in the exhibition.

The film, Ahold of Get the Things To, is a 16 mm-digital transfer projected in the former office. Its plotline, mirrored by the shifted spaces, seems to invert the traditions of narrative continuity and script as it is driven forth not by characters didactically aligned to their surroundings, but by discursive and structural devices. The whale, the tortoise, the parrot. The camera meanders through the space as though attempting to grasp something seemingly immaterial, yet through the space itself, the forms present and the objects found, a recurrent and highly tangible visual and aural syntax is created.

The film is accompanied in the new office space by a papier mâché sculpture as well as a poster advertising the film, thus consecrating the cinematic meandering of the film in objects that play with the external and internal aspects of the project. By tripping over and grasping at the various elements at work, Jacoby’s Ahold of Get the Things To reveals something about the malleability of storytelling, when its syntactical strength lies in the keyframing what is generally left out of frame. The dislocated office also displays works by G. Küng, Piotr Makowski, Olve Sande and Sean Townley, who have recently exhibited at the gallery.

Daniel Jacoby (b. 1985) lives and works between Amsterdam NL and Frankfurt am Main DE. He partecipated in many personal and collective exhibitions: A Mount – Rushmore – Resembling Piece of Cheddar Cheese…, 1646, The Hague; Latsempo◸ar, Casino Luxembourg Project Room, Luxembourg, 2012; Videobrasil 30 years, 18th Contemporary Art Festival, São Paulo, 2013; Collective Fictions, cur. by Albertine de Galbert, Isabelle Le Normand, Anca Rujoiu, Andrew Berardini and Jesse McKee, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; FFM:HH, cur. by F. Solte and I.Busch, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, 2013.

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