\f \— a taut body, a line, a ledge, a ladder. It is both structure and tension, a vessel through which presence moves, tracing a temporal and physical axis.
X — a mark, a crossing, a coordinate, an unknown. It signals fracture. It holds the possibility of rupture, of movement between stasis and collapse, of memory pressed into form.
–ile — a suffix suggesting tending toward, a movement rather than a state: fragile, flexile fractile. In \f\XILE, it evokes a body or structure leaning into uncertainty, a line drawn between points. Before tremor. Before release. The ladder, the vaults, the intervals between film and thud: here –ile becomes an inclination, a crossing held in suspense, registering the impermanent echoes of stone and spine.
At Lavit Gallery, \f\XILE unfolds across two vaults, each offering a distinct encounter with temporal and corporeal presence. In the first, a long-form film commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre, an essay in image and sound tracing the imprint of place. In the second vault, a driftwood ladder is activated by a feedback system, sending tremors through its body that sound the stone chamber. The architecture itself resonates under tension, folding image, sound, and material into a living, responsive environment.
A line is walked along a railing, suspended between Sirius and Spike, two poles of gravity. Verticality stretches the body taut, a seam stitched across water and distance – shadow bent, pulsating thread of static binding two sites.
The fractured image is now living, light, water, and shadow traced, its edges memory made flesh. In the pause between ‘motion stillness’ the past leans forward, waiting to be carried on.
This line traces the weight of absence. As Said writes, exile is both wound and vantage, producing double vision: uprooted and seeing from many sides. This tension surfaces through the fragility of expired Soviet film and through the body itself:
the body is a vessel of memory. but also its rupture. a liquid archive; spilling forward and back
[Benjamin’s angel of history faces the past, swept by the storm of progress, yet here it bears Khlebnikov’s broken tongue, a bird learning to stammer toward flight.]
[Cixous casts Icarus as inheritance: the body writing what it has received, flight etched in flesh, a descend began of his father and vanished at sea.]
What fractures in projection, gathers in the body as mute currents stretched between water and stone.
What could not speak ignites in the body: a flash of memory sears the flesh, memory that resists articulation insists on form.
Photographs by Erin Plaice (c)
The work has been created under the mentorship of Miguel Amado, initially in the context of Sample-Studios’s Studios of Sanctuary scheme, and subsequently with support from SIRIUS.
Artem engages with endurance and spirituality. His background in theatre and dance, including Butoh, shapes his approach to various media and subjects, including experimental darkroom techniques, found light, and themes of displacement and mysticism.
\F\XILE is a somatic exploration of the SIRIUS building and its environs. It uses audio-visual elements and live outputs to consider the relationship between self and landscape, stillness and movement, and land and water. The work examines how memory and perception inhabit the body and how seeing can become a form of exile.
\F\XILE is commissioned by SIRIUS. The production of the work is realised with funding from the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport through the Regional Museum Exhibition Scheme 2025.
artemgolden.com 