BY REBECCA BELL

I met with Serena Korda to talk about her current exhibition ‘There’s a Strange Wind Blowing’ at the TINTYPE Gallery, London, which is her first solo show. The exhibition takes its title from a puppet performance recently developed during a residency in Klenova in the Czech Republic. Winner of the Deutsche Bank Prize and the Start Point Prize for her recent graduate show at the RCA in 2009, Korda cites ‘A Short History of the World’ as an analogy for her work: “the book’s promise and aspiration appeal to my own tendency toward the absurd and impossible. Such outmoded forms of knowledge inspire revision and retelling. Looking back at the things that have been left out, I want to restructure the order and importance placed on certain aspects of our history, highlighting the abandoned bits. Through performance, print and film I attempt to work these stories back into the fabric of the everyday, telling them through the magic of the makeshift and homemade.”

The TINTYPE show pulls together all of these elements and contains a variety of works. ‘Old Men’s Flesh’, a textile piece where tattoos have been sewn onto an old blanket by various people brought together by Korda since 2004, is a work she describes as being about “ritual.. conversations.. and private acts”. Across the gallery from this is Building the Matterhorn, a film showing Korda building a replica of the Matterhorn mountain, playing on the image of a hobbyist, a “railway-making nerd”. The film is two-fold in that it refers to the building of the Disneyland Matterhorn in 1951 whilst it contains a voice over telling the account of American mountaineer Annie Smith Peck. Korda’s interest in this story stems from an admiration of Peck’s humility and honesty regarding her climb. One of her male companions stalled her progress and ruined any chance of her recording the trip, eventually unchaining himself and going to the summit before her. As a result she had no time to record the climb via photographs or measurements, and no evidence exists except her word. These themes of recording, history, and authenticity play out throughout the exhibition. The story of Peck’s ascent is further explored in puppet performance ‘There’s a Strange Wind Blowing’. The performance takes place in a 1940’s kitchen cabinet, and was shown during the private view but also a further three times during the exhibition’s run (Korda states: “I was pleased I could do the performance several times, I wanted that rhythm and repetition”). The narrative of the performance hinges on a fictional encounter between Walt Disney and Peck, simultaneously recovering the lost story of Peck’s expedition whilst reinventing the significance of Disney’s Matterhorn. Korda also explores gender, alluding through Peck and Disney to the age-old custom of Punch and Judy.

Puppets have been significant to Korda for some time, but particularly since visiting a small puppet theatre in Paris a year and a half ago. Built in the 1930s, the theatre was being maintained and run in the same manner as it had been from its establishment. Korda, with the help of a French friend translating, obtained permission to film inside this “relic”. The resulting film shows, from a backstage view, three puppeteers in thick woollen jumpers (“the theatre was freezing”) carrying out a synchronised dance in great seriousness whilst on the end of their outstretched arms are a row of frog puppets, moving in perfect time. The film moves to the perspective of the audience, who sit slouched in anoraks, as serious as the puppeteers. The only people apparently enjoying themselves are the frogs with their fixed fabric grins. Korda was fascinated by the lack of audience participation more common to current puppetry and in keeping with the old-fashioned nature of the environment she “decided to embark on using a 16mm camera, it seemed right for the subject and the era of the performance. When I got there it was all on his terms and I didn’t feel I had much time. I didn’t trust the camera and I didn’t think I was getting anything, but then I got the film and it was beautiful.” The resulting film exposes the process of things, how things work. The Matterhorn film explores the same territory “without my having to film a place – I was recreating something.”

In the same way, the performance of ‘There’s a Strange Wind Blowing’ exposes the process of Korda’s puppetry. First performed in Czech in the Czech Republic, the piece was met by a solemn response which Korda allots to a mixture of the serious nature of puppetry in the Czech Republic where it has an extended history and is deeply nuanced, as well as a certain misunderstanding of English absurdism, a humour which Korda feels is embedded in her work and self. The process of performance, what it means and the role of these strange puppets, refers to the human need to play which Korda cites as key to her work. When I suggest the performance in the 1940’s kitchen cabinet reminded me of playing for hours with my sister and our Barbies in a large cardboard doll’s house, she agrees: “yes! That was one of the reasons it had to be my sister! Play is important to me and as an arts educationalist I believe we shouldn’t stop playing.” Korda wanted her performance to be stripped down, for the process to be revealed. Needless to say the groomed London gallery audience was more ready to laugh and enjoy the work, equipped with their expectations of contemporary, and perhaps more specifically, Korda’s art.

The works shown at the TINTYPE gallery address the duality of cerebral and physical activity. In 2008 Korda carried out a commission for Art on the Underground, ‘The Answer Lies at the End of the Line’, a site-specific work for Stanmore station inspired by Stanmore’s connection with Bletchley Park which was home to a group of British World War II code-breakers brought in to decipher the German Enigma code . Bletchley’s code breakers were drawn from various backgrounds and included chess champions, mathematicians and polyglots. The ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in less than 12 minutes was one of the tests for potential recruits. After this project “which was such a cerebral process, a lot of working out, I wanted to do something very physical and communicate without words. I wanted to dig a hole and spoke to lots of artists who have dug holes; a whole history of digging a hole came about. For me it was about the logistics of doing this and the achievement of physically digging a hole. And it occurred to me that as I dug a hole I created a mountain [of earth removed from the hole]. The idea of achievement came about and I became interested in the writings of Annie Peck Smith.”

Another film work included in the exhibition shows a group of people in the deepest countryside dismantling the 1940’s cabinet used as the set for the above performance. “It was in the Czech Republic. I saw a few of those cabinets and wanted one to be in my work. The mission became finding one, which sounds easier than it is as in the Czech Republic they don’t have this idea of retro chic. There are loads of bazaars and it was like Brick Lane the way it would have been 15 years ago. They only had 1980’s Formica so we went on e-bay and found one. We had a big red van and wondered if it would fit, but when we arrived we realised we had to take it apart. We had to persevere and as I had the video camera, I just started filming and thought it was hilarious. They were so sweetly helping us. It is very unlike the way I have been making films before so it was nice for me just to film. It has a relationship to the other works in terms of how people relate to one another, how they work together, how they took a cabinet apart.”

Another element of the exhibition are a series of photos taken from her ‘DECOSA Traditional, Stockholm Kiefer/pin’ residency at Camden Arts Centre earlier this year. Again inspired by the Czech residency, Korda became fascinated by a material she found in OBI (the German equivalent of B&Q): “I was trying to find some rope in OBI and got lost in its labyrinth of aisles; I ended up in the wallpaper section and saw Decosa. I totally forgot about the rope, bought a pack of Decosa and went back to my studio to make a fake block of wood. Decosa is a polystyrene material in wood form so you can clad your ceiling with a chalet effect. I made a block of wood and it was very light and leant itself to a performance. Camden asked for a proposal and I wished to make 100 blocks that could be moved around and make monumental sculptures, which they did. The company gave me free material. I was in South East Czech Republic which is a logging, wood region so it seemed strange they wanted this false version. We then had dancers over three days wearing a hybrid folk, costume, doing a Moravian-style performance. I made the costumes myself as I wanted them to be homemade, and the materials came from a Dalston African fabric shop. There was the idea of the invented tradition, the DIY ritual. I wanted to demonstrate that with the wood but then also this collision of authentic and invented folk performance.”

Her next project is called ‘Laid to Rest’, and will transform dust collected from houses, businesses and institutions into a time capsule of 500 commemorative bricks. The bricks will be put on display as part of ‘DIRT’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection 24th March – 31st August 2011. Each brick will contain the specific dust of its contributor and will be imprinted with information cataloguing its origins. A stack of bricks will grow over the course of the exhibition and when 500 bricks have been made they will travel in procession through the streets of London and finally be buried in a hole.

Inspired by the commercialization of waste in Victorian London from the dust heaps of Gray’s Inn Rd to the engineering achievements of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system. The dust heap was a monument to the invisible and provided a major source of income. One of the industries to be born out of the heap was London brick-making: ash, cinders and rubbish from the heap was mixed with the mud of nearby brick fields to produce the humble brick.

Serena Korda’s work has been described as “a detective-like inquiry of forgotten histories”. She reinvents and recreates social history and ritual, in so doing exposing method and process, inviting the audience to question the order and importance of what is remembered, recorded, or left out. Through the makeshift and handmade she creates multifaceted stories and events through performance, print and film. However in doing so, as with the TINTYPE exhibition, she creates a highly polished result which fits together into a fascinating narrative, often made up of deeply beautiful objects and imagery.

To see more of Serena’s work go to www.serenakorda.com

To get involved with her forthcoming project go to http://donateyourdust.blogspot.com/

Other useful links: http://art.tfl.gov.uk and http://www.wellcomecollection.org/