Modern Art Oxford
Launch event for Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself

I met Barbara in the 70’s and developed a more in depth relationship with her in the 80’s during the setting up of a Bow Gamelan Ensemble performance, Offshore Rig, at Lots Ait, an island on the Thames. We invited the poet/percussionist Z’EV to take part. Later Barbara made the film ‘I Find myself,’ with him which is the title of the exhibition. Barbara was searching for her more personal voice outside of Artist Placement Group and Organisation and Imagination. Her work titled ‘Beyond the acid free’ at Arnolfini, 2009, used a shredder on her archival material. For me this freed her archives from its regimented and stable order into a new dynamic ordered disorder, full of chance and poetry. Thinking of Barbara’s love of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s work, which had an intense raw and visceral physicality and these shredded fragments of different texts, I conceived a work in which shredded photocopies of her archives were explosively distributed amongst the audience from compressed air cannons. The audience were showered with fragments of her archives, becoming a collective of Barbara’s visions.