Tremulations

Description

Tremulations presents objects from the archives of Swedenborg House as well as writings and works of art by, among others, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim and Yayoi Kusama. It combines elements from the Swedenborg House archive, including lead printing plates and manuscript notebooks, with works of modern and contemporary art, film and literature. Structured according to Swedenborg’s unique and ground-breaking model of categorization as developed in his early essay On Tremulation (1719), the exhibition was presented in chapters manifested in physical, temporal and virtual space at Swedenborg House. Swedenborg’s ‘Nine Rules of Tremulation’ is a schema to explore forms of dissemination and transmission, both historical and contemporary: mirror images, dreams, reflections, divinatory visions, phantasies, recollections, prophesies and hallucinations, plus cinematic forms of projection that employ technologies of mediation older than television and video, as well as forms both post-cinematic and virtual. Each chapter of the exhibition included a virtual reality work produced by Acute Art: The Bridge by Mark Leckey; Hilma af Klint: The Temple; and It will End in Stars by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg. The full list of artists involved in the exhibition is: Tony Cokes, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Marcel Duchamp, Hilma af Klint, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Leckey, Grace Ndiritu, Meret Oppenheim, Peter Saville, Emanuel Swedenborg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

The Tremulations publication has been beautifully designed to replicate the iconic Transactions series issued by the Swedenborg Society in the 1930s. It features 48 colour illustrations of the original exhibition and art works, including installation views, and stills from the cinematic and virtual reality artworks that featured. An introduction by Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies shed lights on the contexts and motivating ideas behind the exhibition, further elucidated throughout the book by carefully chosen quotations from Swedenborg’s ‘Nine Rules of Tremulations’ and extracts from writers including Samuel Beckett, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Marcel Duchamp, Briony Fer, Clarice Lispector, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Roussel.