Kirili in Dialogue with
Laurel Jenkins
Laurel Jenkins, dance at White Street with Funambule, 2009
(Photo © Marilia Destot )
“ Alain created a context and community of interdisciplinary artists to be in embodied conversations through performance with his sculptures.”
Laurel Jenkins, June 2024
Laurel Jenkins (& Bettina Neuhaus) improvising with the sculptures of Alain Kirili Solo and Alliance at Art Omi, 2009
(Photos © Marilia Destot )
“ I met Alain and Ariane through my friend Marilia Destot. Upon meeting them I was immediately enveloped by their warmth, their community, and their passion for the arts. Alain and Ariane hosted events with friends, art lovers, and NYC based artists. I had the opportunity to perform twice in their loft engaging with Alain's sculptures and live music. I still remember the feel of the long metal spiraled bars in my hands, the sounds of them scraping along the wood floor of their loft and the weight.
I remember how his sculptures could take my weight, they were extensions of and partners with my body.
I remember that I thought the first performance went much better than the second, because in the first I did less and listened more, whereas in the first performance, I pushed and was therefore less attentive to the materials and sounds I was in relationship to. At the time I was experienced in improvising with live music, exploring puppetry and dancing in the Trisha Brown Dance Company. My fascination of finding lines and engaging the imagination while in physical play with real materials was sparked by this collaboration. I was so honored to perform once again at an opening of Alain's work in Paris.
The context that Alain created for interdisciplinary artists to engage with his work and the generosity that he exuded created a field of connection that I am grateful to have been a part of.
Thank you.”
Laurel Jenkins, June 2024
Rehearsal of Laurel Jenkins, Nioka Workman, Michael Wimberly, White Street, with Alain Kirili , Funambule & Uccelllo, 2009
(Photos © Marilia Destot )
“ The interaction of activities is not a performance but a deep way of life with spiritual union, a cosmogony (…) As I do my sculpture, my close relationships to some artists, musicians, dancers should be understood in a spiritual perspective. ”
Alain Kirili, New York, 2000
excerpt from a conversation with Robert T. Buck, published at the occasion of the exhibition at the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, 2000
Rehearsal of Laurel Jenkins, Nioka Workman, Michael Wimberly, White Street, with Alain Kirili , Funambule & Uccelllo, 2009
(Videos © Marilia Destot )
“Je me suis intéressé à l'improvisation plutôt qu'à l'écriture d'un projet culturel ou musical, parce que la vie est une improvisation. L'improvisation est la mise en scène même de la voix et du corps dans l'instant .
C'est l’occasion rarissime donnée à un public d'assister à la mise en abîme, à la mise en jeu du corps dans une création. C'est également l'explication pour laquelle un musicien qui n'est habitué qu'à la musique écrite à peur devant l'improvisation, car il ne peut s'embarquer dans une éthique créative sans filet, être "l'artiste comme funambule", disait Jean Genet.
Et c'est le funambule qui m'intéresse chez l'artiste.”
Alain Kirili, New York, 2004
excerpt from La liberté planétaire, published in Mémoires de Sculpteur, editions ENSBA, 2007
Laurel Jenkins, Nioka Workman, Michael Wimberly, White Street, with Alain Kirili , Funambule & Uccelllo, 2009
(Photos © Marilia Destot )
In recent years, the development of Kirili’s art has been mostly a matter of elaborating and further exploring earlier themes, while he has also placed more and more emphasis on working with musicians and dancers in collaborative performances involving his sculptures.
(…) Dancers move between and over, lift, lean on, and pull against the sculptural forms, contrasting with their own bodies the bodily references the works contain.
In staging such events, Kirili breaks down barriers between disciplines and gives sculpture a life beyond its role as untouchable museum artifact. That professional musicians and dancers are able to find inspiration in his work is a source of pride and also a confirmation, he feels, of its inherent multiculturalism.
Steven A. Nasher
excerpt from the text published for the Exhibition Kirili: Dialogue with Rodin, Paris, 1999
“ I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution. ”
Alain Kirili, New York, 2018
excerpt from Lightness of Being, a conversation with Mary Jones published in Artcritical, December 27th, 2018
Laurel Jenkins, Thomas Buckner, Jérôme Bourdellon
with the sculptures of Alain Kirili Funambule and Equivalence
at the opening of the exhibition Alain Kirili et Ron Gorchov, Galerie Richard, Paris 2009
(Photos © Ariane Lopez-Huici )
Over the past few years, Alain Kirili’s works have tended towards a greater organic simplicity and lightness of form. In this exhibition he presents three series of sculptures as well as some drawings : the terra cotta works of the Adamah series, the ironwork sculptures of the Equivalence series and the Funambule series. The title of the Equivalences sculptures is inspired by the fact that they can each be exhibited in three different positions. They are « minimalist » geometric shapes brought together in such an innovative way that it is always possible to find three positions of balance.
These works imply notions of movement, improvisation, precariousness and lightness.
In the new works of Funambule this idea is pushed even further and these characteristics become evermore apparent. For Kirili the title is reminiscent of a book by Jean Genet that discusses the ethics of risk in the Creation. The groups of vertical bars which alternate with both raw and painted ironwork placed against a wall with different spacing between each one develop a unique pattern. The metal is pounded in such a way that it appears to have been molded by the palm of a hand. Even as Kirili delves into the depths of visual simplicity, sensuality, body and flesh impregnate his works. When talking about Kirili’s iron bars which he places against the wall, Carter Ratcliff comments that « They are free to fall, and in this freedom one hears an echo of Existentialist talk about the precariousness of life. Of course, Existentialism was grim – a philosophy of angst. If the Funambule sculptures express angst, it is angst evolving into joy at the sheer clarity of their forms, their situation, and, indeed, their meaning.»
Carter Ratcliff
excerpt from the exhibition catalogue Celebration de la main: l'art de Ron Gorchov et Alain Kirili , 19 October - 30 December 2009 , Galerie Richard, Paris