Corin Sworn: The Rag Papers
8 February - 24 March 2013
Preview: Thursday 7 February 2013, 18:30-20:30h
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ

Chisenhale Gallery presents a newly commissioned work by the Canadian, Glasgow based artist Corin Sworn. This will be Sworn’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date and comprises a film presented as part of an installation with synchronised lighting and sound.

The Rag Papers (2013) explores the socially constructed nature of attention and the implications of reuse and appropriation as they reconfigure the meaning of things. The film’s worried narrative shifts between the perspectives of three characters who interact with a series of objects at distinct moments in time. The film uses point of view shots and cutaway sequences to suggest the roaming of each character’s attention and in doing so introduces itinerant spaces such as hotel rooms, sorting depots and markets.

Sworn uses the language of filmmaking to question human agency, layering multiple subjective viewpoints and presenting the distracted nature of attention and thought patterns as she shifts back and forth between the modes of remembering, looking, processing and reading. Objects play a central role in the film, almost as characters in their own right, but the suggestion that they indicate or hold specific meaning is deflected as designations shift.