After Joyce

With the project IN-EXTREMIS 1999 o Estado da(s) Arte(s) no final da dcada, do sculo e do milnio (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 Amanh (After Tomorrow) as part of Lisboa 94, and her elegant and thoughtful one-person show, Ecru, was shown this year at the Pavilho 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, Jubelins 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 Jubelins collaboration with Japanese artist Satoru Itazu. The work was made during Jubelins recent sojourn in Japan. The artists use 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 Blooms life-affirming monologue at the end of James Joyces Ulysses, the artists explore the mythological figure of

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), Joyces 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/Penelopes 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, but also 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 dcada, do sculo e do milnio, Galeria Luis Serpa, Lisbon. Published in Viso, 24 June 1999.