It Has To Be This Way², 2011
Book, 12.9 x 19.8 cm, 174 p, language: English, publisher: Matt's Gallery, London, ISBN: 978 0 907623 76 2.
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/781).
Literary synopsis
From a tangle of research notes, manuscripts and a fateful box of photographs, Lindsay Seers tries to make sense of her stepsister Christine Parkes’ strange behavior following a moped accident in Rome. As the photographs in the box are deciphered through both an excess and lack of memory, the characters who interpret them move fluidly through interlocking histories. When Christine goes missing in 2001 amid a string of enigmatic events relating to Renaissance occult practices, Seers decides to re-stage a journey to West Africa made by Christine in 1996 after the death of her father. Travelling through Ghana in a colonial costume, Christine had unlocked the secret history of her father's involvement in diamond smuggling on the former Swedish/Danish Gold Coast. Somewhere between the unreliable, guilt-ridden recollections of a mother, the exaggerated memoirs of a mercenary uncle and the manipulative diaries of a man known only as S, Seers seeks answers to the mysterious fate of her mourned stepsister. Locked in a futile search for historical and photographic truth, the protagonists become prisoners of their own memories while the lens becomes a speculum producing truths rather than recording them.
Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice
The books are an integral part of the exhibition It Has To Be This Way and were distributed free of charge in the gallery space. The books are not ancillary to the exhibition but an element of a system in which the exhibited parts are co-dependent. The book, building and film are generated from a system whereby a series of photographs are chosen from a collection of the artist and her family by protagonists who themselves were selected by the artist on the finding of a dead bee. These images form the narrative structure of the film and book and the installation. Everything is entwined but the novel which would be read after the exhibition in a different place/time inevitably calls on and alters the memory of the film's narrative.
Authorship: Appropriation/Collage, Fictional Author.
Creative Strategy: Artworks Cite Novel, Novel Writes Itself .
Genre: Plain Fiction.
Publishing: Art Gallery.
Theme: History, Memory, Photography, Truth.
Media
>Cover 'It Has To Be This Way²', 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
>installation view 'It has to be this way 2', BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011
Artists
> Lindsay Seers.
> M. Anthony Penwill.
Exhibitions & Ensembles
> Exhibition: The Preparation of the Novel (Book Lovers 5.0). Fabra i Coats - Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, 18 July 2014 - 05 September 2014.
> Exhibition: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE ARTWORK BECOMES A NOVEL?. M HKA, Antwerp, 07 December 2012 - 21 April 2013.
> Exhibition: THE BOOK LOVERS - A Project about Artist Novels. The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, 25 January 2013 - 09 March 2013.
> Exhibition: Book Lovers 4.0 (Pop-up Bookstore). De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, 28 January 2014 - 02 February 2014.
> Ensemble: The Artist's Novel.
Related Items
>Lindsay Seers, M. Anthony Penwill, It Has To Be This Way, 2009.Book, ink, paper, 12.9 x 19.7 cm, 126 p, language: English, publisher: Matt's Gallery, London, ISBN: 978 0 907623 64 9.
>Lindsay Seers, M. Anthony Penwill, It Has To Be This Way 1-5, 2010.Book, ink, paper, 19.7 x 12.8 cm, 126 p, language : English, publisher : Matt's Gallery, ISBN : 978-0-907623-75-5.