Call in your muses

upcoming
7 Nov – 5 Dec

Benjamin Ord

Enjoy is pleased to present Call in your muses, the first institutional solo exhibition by Benjamin Ord, bringing together a suite of existing and newly commissioned moving image works.

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Paying close attention to the texture and grain of his materials, Ord works across media and formats, from Super 8 film to mobile-phone recordings and found video, moving between analogue and digital technologies. Loops and edits are made to unsettle an image’s relationship to sound, while repetition defamiliarises ordinary gestures and choreographed movements. Across his practice, Ord draws on his background as a dancer and choreographer, bringing archival material into contact with his own footage while reworking recorded movements into scores for further encounters. Sources ranging from Hollywood cinema and neoclassical ballet to musical recordings and the gestures of everyday life meet in compositions that loosen familiar associations between image and sound. In the interval between between objects and their representations, a body and its image, Ord finds inspiration for new associations, opening familiar material to unforeseen poetic possibilities

Curated by Tendai Mutambu

Benjamin Ord is an artist and choreographer born in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand and based in London. His practice, primarily based in performance and moving image, explores how the body pushes against the fixed surface of a finite image, object or linear time. Frequently using methodologies and forms that are lo-fi and queer, his work points to an expanded notion of liveness that intervenes in the present moment in order to gesture towards the transformational potential of the future. He has shown work at venues including Marta Mora, RM Gallery, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Close-Up Film Centre, APT Gallery, Spike Island, DAAD Gallery, and The Place. As a dancer for over a decade he worked for several major dance companies including Company Wayne McGregor, as well as performing in work by Sriwhana Spong, Tino Seghal, and Pablo Bronstein, among others. Benjamin holds an MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths, University of London, an MA Creative Practice from Trinity Laban, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Kingston School of Art at Kingston University, London.