MANCHESTER, NH – Kelley Stelling Contemporary presents a special video and audio installation by Annie Zverina titled “Prelapsarian.” Show dates are September 27 through October 27, 2018. There will be an artists’ reception at the gallery, located at 221 Hanover St., on Thursday, September 27, 2018 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
(Prelapsarian, adj: Of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.)
Annie Zverina mines the historical archives of United States political history, recreating and emphasizing connections between seemingly disparate historical anecdotes through multiple media.
“I just want to ask you one favor,” Nixon told Haldeman. “If I’m assassinated, I want you to have them play ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and have Lawrence Welk produce it.” – from “Richard Nixon: The Life”, by John A. Farrell.
Annie Zverina is both working toward and pulling apart an articulation of the refusal of ahistoricism, pitting meta-narratives against the notion of hypermodernity. In “Prelapsarian,” Zverina exhibits discrete pieces that challenge the semiotics – the signs and symbols – of political power through the use of historical anecdotes. Citing Dante’s Divine Comedy as the original autobiography as epic, a widely adopted and bastardized form of political speech.
We are experiencing the rejection of language. The recording of an accordion plays. A partial recording of Franz Liszt’s “Dante Symphony” performed on the accordion marks the impending expiration of eulogy as the overarching form of political speech.
From an interview conducted during “Vicious Circle” at Anytime Dept. in Cincinnati OH in September 2017, Zverina states:
“I think that the possible imaginary has been somewhat uprooted by the purposeful degradation of “central reality-narratives” from seats of power. The sinister possibilities of narrative as an encompassing force of power has endless historic precedence, but its place at the forefront of American politics today complicates the resistive potentials of counter narratives in that diversion from “central reality-narratives” has been co opted as a tool of oppression and purposeful misinformation by the President of the United States and those around him.”
