Helen Anna Flanagan

The first work encountered by viewers when entering Helen Anna Flanagan’s solo exhibition “Gesticulating… Wildly”, is the film Gestures of Collapse (2019), set inside a generic school gymnasium and narrated by a dandy television presenter. Four uniformed schoolgirls carefully traverse the gym, along and across the colourful lines marking the floor. These lines are both familiar and cryptic, denoting rules only half understood, that can change from one hour, one game to the next. They don’t physically prevent or allow movement but hold the power to determine who wins and who loses. The exhibition itself is also structured by these demarcations, with lines of tape and low brick walls dividing and connecting different areas.

Helen Anna Flanagan’s work grapples with the boundaries and borders of society that are not quite invisible, but whose subtlety often belies the extent of their influence. In the same film, the girls are seen huddled together and whispering, their sentences echoing and melding into each other: ‘Haven’t you heard…?’ ‘Yeah, I heard herd?’ ‘Haven’t you heard her?’. The rumour in question is that of a psychosomatic illness caused by the consumption of Coca-Cola, a real case of widespread hysteria in the 1990s that, fuelled by hearsay and the media, spread from one Belgian village to the next. The conflation of the words ‘heard’ ‘her’, and ‘herd’ is deliberate and telling: a whisper shared between girlfriends turns into a scream and then a national scandal.

In “Gesticulating… Wildly”, objects and details from each of the three films expand into the real space of the exhibition to create a total environment. The sounds of one film carry the visitor to the next, occasionally spilling over. As viewers immerse themselves in Flanagan’s universe, they become protagonists in their own right, inhabiting the familiar situations of someone watching television, running errands, ordering junk food. Who do we trust? Which behaviour do we find acceptable, and which actions do we condemn? When has somebody crossed a line? “Gesticulating…Wildly” pushes us to leave our physical and ideological comfort zones and take a position.

Flanagan’s work has all kinds of resonance with IKOB’s theme for 2021, where we consider the power and potential of gossip. In a 2017 essay for Tank Magazine, Hannah Black personifies the figure of the gossip and writes: “[she] crosses back and forth between home and world, between the secret interior and the public exterior, carrying items to trade: shared knowledge, a shoulder to cry on, insight, fun”. As an artist and as a filmmaker, Flanagan does a very similar thing. She eavesdrops on private thoughts of her characters while adamantly exposing them to the presence of others in public settings. Like the houseflies that act as a recurring motif throughout her works, the artist observes with curiosity but keeps her distance, letting the action unfold and her protagonists unravel.

Gesticulating Wildly... takes place following the 2019 IKOB Feminist Art Prize, where a jury consisting of Daniella Géo (formerly HISK, Gent), Louise Osieka (CIAP, Hasselt), Marie-Hélène Joiret (Chataigneraie, Flemalle) and Eva Wittocx (Museum M, Leuven) chose Helen Anna Flanagan for the first prize, leading to the invitation for a one-person exhibition at IKOB.

Text by Brenda Guesnet