Eleanor Ivory Weber
April 14 – June 5, 2022


Eleanor Ivory Weber is the second guest of the series On and Off the Grid, a yearly program of presentations and events dedicated to various form(at)s of publishing. Taking place the street level window display, the format provides a platform for the introduction, examination, and (re)negotiation of the materials and processes involved in publishing.

Weber is an artist and writer living in Brussels, where she teaches art theory and critical practice at Erg (École de recherche graphique–école supérieure des arts), and is co-director of Divided Publishing. Weber’s work expropriates the conventions and styles of Western news media to register and materialize a subjectivity that appears latent in the source. Her presentation will conclude with a performance event on Saturday, June 4.

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The mouth is a clock without hands

A city skyline is silhouetted against a pink sunset, the lights of the buildings are reflected in the water below, which looks purple. An aeroplane flies out of the frame on the top left of the image, taking off somewhere. It is a warm image, feels like summer’s coming, that feeling at dusk when the night is full of potential and we don’t know what will happen.

In the same movement reportage bears witness to the world and consumes it. It is also a technique for making equivalences out of what is irreconcilable. I keep track of the dates when important things happen as a way to remember how the past shows up today. All the while I am trying to understand how repetitions, forgetting and suspended apprehension are equally part of personal and public events, places and products.

Everything that enables us to record, witness and claim history, also enables us to miss it. The news form is fatal and always precedes the catastrophe of its daily content. Be wary when your senses are trivialised by the marching gait of development, algorithms for ‘personal preferences’ or the hegemony of the new. Grief is not objective.

(EIW)

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List of works

Recognise this city?, 2022
Poster found 7 December 2018 in the old Actiris building in the centre of Brussels, black and pink vinyl, ‘Ee’ typeface based on my handwriting designed 2016 by Ella Sutherland, 16 neodymium magnets
98 x 68 cm

The mouth is a clock without hands, 2022
Digital prints
15 x 15 cm

Daily news, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, 14.04–05.06.2022, Munich, 2020–
The New York Times International Edition purchased each day the exhibition is open to the public

Overseas (Majestic Fanfare, 1988 version), 2022
ABC Radio news broadcast theme played on the hour between 6 am and 11 pm (AEST), 9-second abridged version, 18-second main version at 7am only