M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, has invited British video and performance artist Emily Wardill to make a selection of works from the collection and to show two of her own films, The Diamond (Descartes Daugther) (2008, 16mm, 15’) and Gamekeepers Without Game (2009, video, 76’).

The exhibition functions as a prologue to the presentation of Emily Wardill’s new film Fulll Firearms, which will have its premiere at Cinema Zuid in Antwerp on 14 December 2011. Fulll Firearms is co-commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, the Serpentine Gallery in London and Film London’s FLAMIN. Co-produced by City Projects. Supported by Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe and M HKA.

Through her selection from the M HKA collection, Wardill weaves the works of other artists into her own narrative. Guillaume Bijl’s, Leo Coper’s, Lili Dujourie’s and Luc Tuymans’s installations say things through objects in ways that are not dissimilar to Wardill’s own approach. The photographic images by Dirk Braeckman and Danny Matthys, the drawn and painted images by Elly Strik and Marthe Wéry and the three-dimensional images by Pieter Engels, Cady Noland and Didier Vermeiren also enter into dialogue with Wardill’s two films – without being made to tell a unified story.

Variation and permutation – the slippage between things that are somehow but not quite the same – are favoured working methods for many artists, also for Wardill. Gert Robijns, another artist who was asked to intervene in the M HKA collection, produced black-and-white ‘doubles’ of works by Bernard Frieze, Hermann Pitz and Ettore Spaletti. Both sets of works are included in the exhibition that Emily Wardill has set up as a non-textual double of her own narrative variations and permutations.

Source of text: press release M HKA.

The exhibition and film of Emily Wardill is part of the European collaboration between M HKA, Wyspa in Gdansk, Site Gallery in Sheffield and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, and is generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, and the Culture Programme of the European Union.