The Everynight
December 2017

Curated by Alaena Turner

Thorbjørn Andersen
Anthony Faroux
Steffen Levring
Alaena Turner“In a first approximation, the everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves ordinarily.” 

-Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’



‘The Everynight’ takes as a starting point the involvement of a group of artists in the 1930s with the Mass-Observation movement: a surveillance project which sought to produce an independent record of everyday life in Britain, combining approaches from sociology, psychology and Surrealism, to pursue “an anthropology of the near”. Central to this was ‘sayfulness’, a term coined by Tom Harrison, co-founder of Mass Observation, to promote subjective, expressive modes of recording which seek to convey immediate sensory experience, whilst pointing to the limit of what may be sayable or representable, noting how the everyday may transform in “The answer to the stranger, friend, heart, wife, dream.”

To enter into the logic of archiving the everyday and attending to the continual flow of visual stimulus in our daily environments a survey has been initiated by Alaena Turner in collaboration with Tørreloft. Artists have been invited to document and share the images which they encounter in their living or workspace on a regular basis, forming an open archive of studio postcards and visual artworks such as posters, paintings and photographs, which have been chosen, or at least accommodated, as images to be lived with and kept close to hand. As a collective record, this perhaps speculates on a composite and fictionalised figure of the artist, pursuing what the artist looks at most often, an art of the everyday or the artist ordinarily.

A new wallpaper commission by Anthony Faroux, photographic work by Thorbjørn Andersen and a sound performance by Steffen Levring will be presented, exploring how the potentially mundane character of domestic environments and routines of daily work may be traversed by new modes of attention.  Here observation is situated in relation to abstraction, perhaps offering a lyrical counterpart to the everyday, in the more ambiguous category of The Everynight.

-Alaena Turner