To coincide with the publication of the latest in Afterall’s One Work series, Afterall will exhibit Rodney Graham’s Phonokinetoscope (2001). This is the first time that Afterall will present an exhibition of this kind.

Rodney Graham’s Phonokinetoscope is a five minute, 16mm film installation in which the artist is seen riding his Fischer Original bicycle through Berlin’s Tiergarten while taking LSD, to the soundtrack of a fifteen-minute song (written and performed by Graham) recorded on a vinyl LP. Inspired by Thomas Edison’s invention of the kinetophonograph, the turntable drives the projection of the film.

The film starts when the needle is placed on the record and stops when the needle is taken off. Graham’s ride evokes the Swiss scientist Albert Hofman’s famous 1943 bicycle ride home after an experimental dose of LSD as well as Paul Newman’s backward-facing ride in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; the accompanying music presents a thicket of riffs and borrowings. As the images and visual details repeat in the film’s loop, the artist’s sometimes-playful observations and references become increasingly complex.

Phonokinetoscope refers to a surprising number of works of art and literature, displaying a world rich with subtle meaning. The song, slightly shorter in duration than the film’s length repeats three times on one side of the LP. The film loops until Graham’s psychedelic rock epic comes to an end or whenever one chooses to lift the needle off the record.

Afterall has invited Luminous Books to set up in the Lethaby Gallery entrance for the duration of the exhibition. Afterall One Work books will be available to purchase, and there will be a special selection of psychedelic titles – secondhand, rare and newly sourced by Luminous Books, including some titles presented in collaboration with Rodney Graham.

Phonokinetoscope by Rodney Graham is on loan from Collection M.J.S., Paris Long term loan Collection Mudam Luxembourg - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The exhibition is supported by The Sandra Blow Estate, Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and Lisson Gallery.

Rodney Graham , b.1949 Vancouver, Canada, is recognized for a rigorously intellectual art, which ranges from photography, film, video and music to sculpture, painting and books. Graham’s work examines social and philosophical systems of thought, in particular those derived from the transition of the Enlightenment into Modernism. Underlying each work is an historical context, through which a complex narrative incorporates literary and philosophic references and visual puns. The work is essentially circular in structure and moves in seamless and infinite loops, such as the film trilogy Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999), and City Self/Country Self (2001), where Graham impersonates fictional characters – respectively a castaway, a cowboy and a city dandy as well as its opposite, a country man – who are engaged in the endless repetition of fruitless actions and gestures, caught in the impossibility of reaching any meaningful conclusion. Borrowing from existing models, Graham constructs his own system, whose operating logic, often based in disorientation, the humorous and the absurd, deflects rather than reveals the key to their interpretation.

Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Rodney Graham’, Lisson Gallery, London 2013, ‘Rodney Graham - Canadian Humourist’, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, 2012 and ‘Rodney Graham – Through the Forest’, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, 2010. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Les Dérives de l’imaginaire [Letting the Imagination Drift]’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012 and 2011 ‘Contour 2011 – 5th Biennial of Moving Image’, Contour vzw, Mechelen, Belgium ‘Ha Ha Road’, Quad Gallery, Derby, UK. Travelling to Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, UK.

Rodney Graham is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London and New York; Johnen Galerie, Berlin and Lisson Gallery, London.