ELSEWHERE brings together thirty new works on paper by David Austen and NEW SHOES, a short story by Hisham Matar that will be contemporaneously published in The New Yorker. Their shared subject is the double. In part inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ meditations on the ancient Egyptian spiritual concept, the ka, an exact counterpart with your same walk and your same dress, as well as other folklore and mythic traditions, Austen and Matar engage with the idea of a counterpart who carries on living the life you left behind, in the place you left it.
Austen’s works return to the same figure each time, pale and of no fixed age. The paper’s edge cuts him off at the collarbone, so the shoulders are always bare. What changes is the ground behind him, which swings from chrome yellow to ultramarine, and each shift proposes a different man while the drawing insists on the same one. Hung side by side, any one might be the original or the fourteenth ghost pulled from it. Each sheet carries the same unease: a likeness that can be lifted from its owner can be occupied by somebody else. Matar’s story belongs to a man who left Cairo at eighteen and has built a small, exact life in London. What he learns of himself arrives from elsewhere, at two removes, and the story stays with him as he tries to prove who he is in an unforgiving city. Underneath it lies the subject of the distance between two brothers, a moving rumination on what it means to leave the place we are from, and how much of us stays behind.
The drawings and the story arrive at the same subject from different materials of form, and both hold back the moment the double usually promises: standing in a room with yourself. That meeting is left to the viewer. Which of these heads is the man, and which the rumour of him? And if a likeness can be lifted from its owner and worn by somebody else, how much of what you know about yourself arrived secondhand, from someone who saw you elsewhere?
Hisham Matar’s short story and the complete series of David Austen’s drawings will be published as a book to coincide with this special exhibition. This marks the gallery’s first full-length publication and will include a newly commissioned essay by literary critic, art historian, and friend of the gallery, Matthew Holman.
If you would like to request an exhibition catalogue or pre-order the book, please email: cedric@cedricbardawil.com
