Corin Sworn




Variations on Assembly
22 May - 22 August 2021
OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen as part of CURRENT, a collaborative project with Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee 
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.