Focused on significant but underrepresented historical narratives, Variations of Assembly, captures cultural fragments to build scripts, performances and distributed narratives that bind both true and imagined stories into meanings.

Featuring a new multi-media installation Habits of Assembly II and artist publication Folding Vesuvius, Sworn’s exhibition encompasses architectural augmentation, dance, poetry, sound and video. Registering early 20th Century time-motion-studies, Habits of Assembly II elaborates a critical history of ‘task performance’. Underscoring the false claims to virtuousness declared by efficiency, a driver of industrial discipline, Sworn reveals the tasked body to be a layered and complex organization akin to the factory, but also a symphonic alignment of biological noise.

In English ‘to perform’ does not solely indicate the carrying out of a specific action; it also designates roles and variations in the ‘character’ of the performed act. Imbued with values of quality, efficiency and accuracy, ‘perform’ operates semantically as a means for continuously evaluating gestures inside complex and extended systems. Understanding the performed gesture as poly-corporeal, Sworn with Habits of Assembly II recombines sensations and actions infinitely, situating small gestures of doing as inflected rehearsals of living, in whose variance lies invention, nuance and tempo.