INVISIBLE HOUSE

curated by Brendan Walls

DARK MOFO

presented at

Salamanca Art Centre

Hobart, Tasmania.

14 - 25 June 2018

INVISIBLE HOUSE is a ground-breaking cross media program that seeks to unsettle the barriers between performance, and static arts; science and magic; space and time. Salamanca Arts Centre (SAC), after consolidating 40 years in 2017, throws open its walls, halls and spaces to maverick filmmakers, visionary photographers, installation artists, automatic painters, and committed ritualists in a celebration of arcane knowledge, the sacred and the numinous.

Brendan Walls TohuVBohu

Interview with Brendan Walls at disinfo.com

Light, music, sculpture, ritual, sound and performance are brought together to celebrate encounters with the numinous, memory, time, coincidence and the transcendent.

The site-speciﬁc installation will be regularly transformed by an unfolding series of private and public rituals and performances culminating in a 24-hour performance of a musical score for strings and percussion, formed from recordings made in Mexico and Italy on the feast day of John the Baptist (24 June).

13 years in development, the score final score will be realised by killers from the local experimental music community.

Brendan Walls TohuVBohu

Barry William Hale + NOKO

With Scott Barnes

“Better to reign in Hell
than serve in Heav’n”
– John Milton

Barry William Hale and Scott Barnes use the Enochian alphabet – the script ‘revealed’ to John Dee and Edward Kelley by angels in the sixteenth century – to conjure esoteric art, live music and an unfolding series of audio-visual artworks. This is a continuation of a decades-long research project of art, occult rituals, magic and psychic phenomena.

Barry William Hale is considered one of the key exponents of esoteric art internationally. Barry is working with long term collaborator Scott Barnes, on their decades long, art/magical/psychic research project NOKO. More than just the performative aspect of Hale’s various lines of esoteric research, this incarnation of HYPRKUB 210 is the culmination of 15 years continuous work and incorporates ritual, live music, invocation and automatic art. Each day the space will house the artistic ‘residue’ of the previous day’s occult operation.

NOKO is a structured improvisational space where sonic texture is a menstruum taking cues from the ritual content, and like a fungal mycelium, visible fruiting bodies may occur. This is where the residue is available to an audience either in a live, or recorded format. There is nothing new about the format employed by this collaboration, conversely NOKO taps into what can be considered to be some of the oldest traditions regarding the use of the voice, instruments and performance. If we see technology as a continuum then there is total equivalence given to ancillary devices other than voice and percussive sounds generated by the body alone (a literal definition of cybernetics).

Although research and development of the Enochian Magical system has been a prominent focus, other directions include; A Sonic Magical investigation of the Qlipotic genii, as well as the conjuration of Beelzebub. A NOKO working is not a definitive form but an example or ‘instance’ of its (re)presentation, like a group performing a standard, there is predefined structure but also interpretation of the work. The group being a kind of lens that will always be varied but can never be transparent or neutral to the content

NOKO is also the laboratory in which Barry tests, resolves and actualises much of his final work. This a rare opportunity to watch the artistic process unfold, and chaos congeal into form.

Barry William Hale + NOKO with Scott Barnes

Barry William Hale + NOKO

Barry William Hale + NOKO with Scott Barnes

Barry William Hale + NOKO

Grotesque and visionary photographic creations
from William Mortensen,
the man Ansel Adams once called ‘the Antichrist’.

Loaned to us by the Stephen Romano Gallery,
many of these thirty works have never been exhibited before.

Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery (New York). This is an exhibition of 30 photographic works by William Mortensen to be exhibited in a

purpose-built temporary gallery within the Long Gallery at Salamanca Arts Centre.

Mortensen is a controversial ﬁgure in 20th century photography. His pictorialist style of manipulating photographs to produce romanticist painting-like eﬀects

earned him criticism from photographers of the modern realist movement, in particular, Ansel Adams. However, Mortensen’s visionary work has ﬁnally

received the recognition it deserves with a recent series of extensive retrospectives.

Crowds at the Dark Mofo William Mortensen exhibition. This is the first major exhibition of the Art of William Mortensen outside of the USA,

almot 90 years after the works have been created.

Installation view of William Mortensen in the exhibition INVISIBLE HOUSE courtesy of Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn.

Barry William Hale Magic Sigils with WIlliam Mortensen works.

Freazy of the Spider Torture

Barry William Hale Magic Sigils with William Mortensen works.

The Young Witches Bessom

Barry William Hale Magic Sigils with William Mortensen works.

Between the Pitt and the Pendulum

Barry William Hale Magic Sigils with William Mortensen works.

STEALING TO POWER FROM THE VAMPIRE

Barry William Hale Magic Sigils with William Mortensen works.

Barry William Hale with Magic Sigils with WIlliam Mortensen works.

William Mortensen Courtney Crawford 1924

William Mortensen ISIS 1924

William Mortensen Untitled (Study for LA CHATTE (from the series A Pictorial Compendium of Witchcraft) 1926

William Mortensen The Old Hag 1926

William Mortensen The Witch 1924-1926

William Mortensen The Witch 1924-1926 (With Skull and Scrying Bowl)

William Mortensen The Witch 1924-1926

William Mortensen Fay Wray 1924

William Mortensen Paganini The Devil's Violinist 1932

William Mortensen A Tantric Priest 1932

William Mortensen Untitled 1924

William Mortensen The Old Hag (Preparation for the Sabbath) 1928

SAK YANT with Ajarn Ohr

Submit your skin (and soul)
to a sacred tattoo
from a monk and master
of traditional Thai Sak Yant (or ‘magic tattoo’).

As you discuss your life with Ajarn Ohr, he’ll provide you with spiritual counsel and tattoo your body with an ancient design using a large needle

(traditionally, this was done with a sharpened bamboo stick). Ohr will create a tattoo that’s right for you – a talismanic mark to guide you through life,

drawing on magical knowledge, symbols and texts of Buddhism, Animism and sacred geometry.

SAK YANT with Ajarn Ohr

American Magus | Harry Smith

This retrospective ponders
the pioneering film works of Harry Smith :
American filmmaker, painter, folk music historian,
self-professed shaman and occultist.

Some films also feature a live score
performed by local miscreants.
An Australian premiere.

Presented by Jack Sargeant.

The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

Filmmaker, musician, painter, mystic and string collector Harry Smith wore many hats during his long, eventful life as a key figure of underground culture through the latter half of the 20th century. In this jubilant documentary, director Rani Singh hones in on Smith’s incalculably influential Anthology of American Folk Music, a remarkable and enduring collection of blues and country classics recorded by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Roscoe Holcolmb, the Carter Family and the Memphis Jug Band between 1927 and 1934. Smith, an insatiable amateur musicologist, picked up these rare recordings while still in high school, eventually amassing a collection of more than 8,000 “round black ghosts” (in the words of Smith aficionado Greil Marcus) and releasing the best of the bunch on his Anthology in 1959. Singer/songwriter Bob Neuwirth notes that these songs are about “life, death, blood, betrayal, murder, intoxication” and every one of the seven deadly sins. Upon the collection’s rerelease in 1997, music tribute impresario Hal Wilner organised a series of concerts featuring some of today’s most gifted artists taking a crack at their favourite Anthology tracks. Singh has assembled concert footage, interviews and archival images into a fittingly celebratory, rockin’ doc. Transcendent performances by Beth Orton, DJ Spooky, Sonic Youth, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Lou Reed, Philip Glass, Richard Thompson, Emmylou Harris, Beck and Nick Cave highlight the proceedings, and just wait until you hear Elvis Costello tear into “The Butcher Boy.” The Old, Weird America is a testament to Smith’s impeccable taste in music and that music’s enduring appeal and relevance. As Marcus says, “The weirdness means the story will always be new.”

Biography: Jack Sargent

Described as mixing the “critical apparatus of Foucault’s Language Counter-Memory Practice with the sensibilities of a Tod Browning movie” Jack Sargeant is a writer, curator, artist and lecturer who is fascinated by the limits of human behaviour, and the aesthetic, political, sexual, and philosophical challenges to these limits.

An acknowledged expert in underground film and culture, his work has been described as “dangerously inspirational”. His first book – written when he was 26 – Deathtripping: the Cinema of Transgression (republished as Deathtripping: the Extreme Underground) remains the only complete guide to post-punk New York underground film. Subsequent books Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, Suture and Cinema Contra Cinema continue Sargeant’s exploration of underground cinema and avant garde artistic practice.

Simultaneously Sargeant has written extensively about cult and neglected B-movies with essays appearing in numerous collections including From The Arthouse to the Grindhouse (eds Rob Weiner and John Cline) and Underground USA (eds Xavier Mendick and Steven Jay Schneider). Sargeant has written on J G Ballard in Terminal Atrocity Zone (ed Candice Black) and contributed essays on topics as diverse as car crash pop songs, medical fetishism, road rage, and pubic hair to numerous collections. He has also written essays and introductions for books by Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, Cat Hope and Erin Coates, amongst others.

He has lectured internationally on topics ranging from underground film, the work of William S Burroughs, obscure cultures and many other areas. He has curated film, performance, lectures, spoken word, fine art and photography exhibitions across the world.

Salamanca Arts Center, Hobart, Tasmania.

INVISIBLE HOUSE

Salamanca Art Centre

Brendan Walls TohuVBohu

Barry William Hale + NOKO

With Scott Barnes

Grotesque and visionary photographic creations from William Mortensen, the man Ansel Adams once called ‘the Antichrist’.

Freazy of the Spider Torture

The Young Witches Bessom

Between the Pitt and the Pendulum

STEALING TO POWER FROM THE VAMPIRE

SAK YANT with Ajarn Ohr

American Magus | Harry Smith

Grotesque and visionary photographic creations
from William Mortensen,
the man Ansel Adams once called ‘the Antichrist’.