Athanasios Argianas's practise explores the gaps created and inherent to the translation of aural concepts to the visual arts, and vice versa. His work has in part developed as a response to scientific discoveries and modernist ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries, and such figures as Apollinaire, Raymond Roussel, Oliver Messiaen and LaMonte Young.

The central sculpture to the exhibition encapsulates the potentially endless poem "Sing/Walk Sideways / Walk/Sing From The Middle to the Start/End", written by Argianas and referencing LaMonte Young's instruction piece "Draw a Straight Line and Follow It", which was later interpreted by John Cage. In Argianas's words: "It is an impossible text, aiming to have two alternative endings, with equal hierarchical order; a line (the first part of the text) branches out into Two, the two directions implied (start and end) are simultaneous. If it was read endlessly, in circles, they'd multiply by two each time."

A pair of sculptures make up the work "Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise", developing on from previously exhibited incarnations of this structure and idea. Two vice-like metal elements enclose rock-like objects that look random but are in fact inversions of the same cast sculpture. "Noise" is a sound that because of its irregular and formless character cannot be assigned a pitch as human perception can only comprehend simpler periodic sound. In this work Argianas plays with memory and recognition, key aspects in the understanding of music, and sets up the roughly palindromic forms to trick the viewer into believing that they mimic each other and therefore exposing how little we can also remember and understand visually: "Music lives in that realm, it disappears constantly, it is elusive."

A new series of marker-pen drawings of portraits in profile exhibited here for the first time will complete the exhibition. For each individual Argianas imagines their internal structure emanating outwards in a möbius-strip form taking the place of their identifying facial features. Just as Argianas's sculptures intend to conjure music and the idea of sound into his viewer's minds, these drawings superimpose the artist's imaginings on his projected viewers and his envisioning of their individual interpretations.

"Trying to pin down Argianas's experiential, dynamic system may well be a fool's errand. One can only point to its characteristics: an endless mutability in which sound and language are rendered into objects (and vice versa), and the very process of reception becomes, via compounded allusions to the idea of directionality, part of the work's content. The systems are specific, but their involutions are many, their upshots utterly unscientific: e.g., once Argianas's notion of what a canon might "look" like has been filtered through his subjectivity, and tilted by the objects he exhibits it alongside, it then meets your curiosity—which might extend to wondering what this particular object sounds like. It's a gymnasium for the brain; and there is, of course, a bigger picture here: an approach to art-making that decenters the maker without dissolving into hazy open-endedness—a territory between the structured and the airy that Argianas is making his own.

Athanasios Argianas: Partly Obscured Portrait no. 4 (florian, three quarters right), 2008

marker pens & graphite on card

"At one point in our conversation, he mentions an anecdote referred to by John Cage, regarding how a beautiful human profile ought also to make a beautiful waveform. Here's something else the American composer once said, when asked in a 1966 interview to characterize the distinction between his compositional approach and that of Mahler, Bruckner, et al: "I'm not making a machine. I'm making something more like weather." Meaning: an open system, full of jostling fronts. Take a step towards synthesis—use machines to make weather, and let each viewer be their own meteorologist—and you have the art of Athanasios Argianas." (Martin Herbert, Modern Painters, March 2008)

Born in Athens (b. 1976) Athanasios Argianas completed an MA at Goldsmiths College, London in 2005, having previously studied under Jannis Kounelis at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (1999-2000) and studied painting at the Aristoleteion University of Thessaloniki (1994-97). Solo exhibitions have included The Breeder, Athens (2007), Max Wigram Gallery (2007) and Alessandro De March, Milan (2008). Group exhibitions include "Present Tense", National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007); "Pale Carnage", Arnolfini, Bristol (2007); "Personne ne veut mourir", ARQUEBUSE, Geneva (2006); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Liverpool Biennial (2006); "Art Sessions", Kunsthalle Wien Project Space, Vienna (2006); Prague Biennale 1, National Gallery, Prague (2003). Most recently, Argianas made a performance at Guestroom in London, recording a canon of his composition with three singers. Argianas also produces music under the name Gavouna.

Opening May 23 Athanasios Argianas will be included in the exhibition "Tales of Disbelief", curated by Simone Menegoi at La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec. Nick Laessing, another artist represented by ARQUEBUSE, will also be included.

Pauline Boudry (in collaboration with Renate Lorenz): Normal Work, 2007

(still), 16 mm / DVD, accompanied by 13 framed photographs, 13:00 min.

La Cabine Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz - Normal Work

ARQUEBUSE is proud to present the remarkable and highly acclaimed film installation "Normal Work"'" by the Swiss artist Pauline Boudry, in collaboration with curator/artist Renate Lorenz.

Exhibited in the exhibition "Normal love" at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and more recently the subject of a solo exhibition and catalogue at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, "Normal Work" takes as its starting point the extraordinary self-portraits made by Hannah Cullwick, a maid-of-all-work in Victorian London between 1860 and 1904. In the 13 min film, shot on 16 mm film, the trans-gender performance artist Werner Hirsch is instructed to re-stage four of these photographs that show Hannah Cullwick as a maid, as a lady, as a bourgeois man, and as a slave.

Cullwick was not only a maid who cleaned for various households, she also produced these staged photographs and numerous diaries and letters that are now held as an archive at Trinity College, Cambridge. These materials present her strength, her muscles, and her big, dirty hands: embodiments of her working practice and which she was very proud of, but also in "class drag" or "ethnic drag", as part of a sadomasochistic relationship that she had with Arthur Mumby, a middle-class lawyer and amateur social scientist. The hard physical labour that Cullwick carried out as a domestic servant was later restaged together with Mumby in their meetings in his home.

Werner Hirsch attempts to imitate Cullwick's poses as precisely as possible, following instructions called to him/her from outside the film frame, thereby setting up a struggle of wills and a suggestion of master/servant relations, not to mention a sexual tension between the person making the film off-stage, implicating the viewer with the same potentially erotic charge. While props suggest the Victorian age, these are interchanged with those that signify the present day and contemporary sexual culture. The two historical periods meet and contradictory references arise by placing the historical photographs in the context of contemporary drag performances.

The film "normal work" exposes the crossings of social hierarchies of class, gender and "race" that Hannah Cullwick staged and that she obviously desired.