While the performance investigates formalism in sculpture practice through impulses in the body making knots with different planar materials, conceptually it also touches upon one of McMahon’s overarching artistic explorations: the materialization of a poetic form of agency between non-speaking beings and the world. Reflecting on Kafka’s short story ‘A report to an Academy’, in which an ape recounts his transition to a human identity as a means to survive his captivity, Kacem’s and McMahon’s investigation through form also serves as a gateway and/or metaphor of enquiry about how Wattana’s behaviour is enacted and how within this enactment certain realities are favoured within representations of captive animal behaviour.

In Sock Horror, McMahon also addresses discursive expression and the affinities between non-speaking beings and the world. Through the lens of her artistic explorations into structuralist filmmaking, Sock Horror underlines how films convey meaning through the use of codes and filmmaking conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication. In Sock Horror, McMahon overlaid generic audiovisual editing effects onto video footage of socks abandoned in an empty stadium, creating an atmosphere of suspense that is absurd. The traditional visual and aural codes and formal conventions deployed by horror films make visible how certain signs or symbols act on our understanding of images but also pose questions about the breaking-point of knowledge, the boundaries between imagination and reality, and the gap between the human and the spiritual.

Dear Wattana (2018)
Bea McMahon and Sonia Kacem
HD video (colour/sound)
Duration: 16:30
Filmed at Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, 21st September 2018.
Camera: Franck Alix

Sock Horror (2017)
HD video (colour/sound)
Duration: 1:12

Bea McMahon’s recent practice has encompassed sculpture, moving image and live performance and deals with how these mediums inform one another. Looking through the camera lens frames her relation to diagram, visibility, foreground and background, and looking from the point of view of the body is for feeling out the logic of movement, the staging of daring or shock and the possibility of ethical effects. In her works she attempts to discover poetic forms of agency between non-speaking beings and the world.

Recent projects include performances at Art Oost, Amsterdam; PuntWG Amsterdam; Cave Gallery, Tokyo; Tunnel, Rome; Bologna.cc, Amsterdam, FLAM VII Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam; Open Avond(s), De Appel, Amsterdam; Kisses Sweeter than Wine, Treignac Projet, France; Lost and Found, Musiek Gebouw, Amsterdam; International BRUD day, The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 2016; FLAM VI Amsterdam; Umsteulpung, The XII Baltic Triennial, Vilnius 2015; Bob’s your Uncle, Kunstverein, Amsterdam; W139, Amsterdam; Via Farini, Milano 2014; Evil under the Sun, Volcano Extravaganza, Stromboli, 2013. Solo exhibitions Rank at Billytown, Den Haag 2017; BOM at CCA Derry 2015; Cover at Salzburg Kunstverein 2014; Bea McMahon, Treignac Projects, France 2013, Root Temple Bar Gallery and Studios 2012; Warp and Woof, CCA Glasgow 2011; <trinity> Flattime House, London, 2011.

She has undertaken residencies at Flattime House, London, ACC Gwangju, Korea; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburg; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and Via Farini, Milan. She is in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and FRAC Midi- Pyrenees. She is number zero in the Polish art parasite BRUD.

She edits a zine SIC Intertrashional that is launched with performances during the earth’s equinoxes, she composes and performs with the lip-synching franchise Dina from Egypt and the collective Multiple Choice, that produces all kinds of multiples.

Bea McMahon by Chris Fite-Wassilak, Art Monthly No 353, February 2012.

O Chair, O flesh by Chris Fite-Wassilak, Frieze, Issue 158, October 2013.

Jesus and Chlorophyll; To Unfold Indefinitely, by Maeve Connolly, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, 2012.

The Volcano Extravaganza by Jennifer Higgie, Frieze, Issue 158, October 2013.

Image: Bea McMahon and Sonia Kacem, Dear Wattana (2018) film still, HD video (colour/sound)
Duration: 16:30
Filmed at Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, 21st September 2018.
Camera: Franck Alix