Rob Kulisek
12 Variations
18 November — 20 December 2025
As far as intoxicated (de)structurings go, Rob Kulisek’s 12 Variations is a composite half-fictional film portrait bursting with dissolving distinctions. Part classic documentary, part confessional, part nocturnal reverie, all and none of the above, it follows Paul-Alexandre Islas, an artist and burgeoning musician, as his own internal struggles seamlessly merge with the Parisian underworld and bleed into that of classical music and its prodigies. Is madness a prerequisite to becoming a musical virtuoso? Must the demonic energy of the composition also pulse through the artist’s veins, in danger of overspilling, for the score to be mastered? Like Icarus, flying too close to perfection can lead to a sudden and painful descent to reality. Like the addict, the pianist dwells in a microcosm that demands commitment, desire, sacrifice. To possess requires opening oneself up to possession.
Call it coincidence, call it fate, Rob once inherited and inhabited Paul-Alexandre’s old bedroom. In a certain way then, 12 Variations could be seen as an enduring testament to the subliminal transmission of a shared energy, flinging itself between destruction and creation, flowing from one artist to the other within the confines of a few square metres somewhere up on the 14th floor of a high-rise in the north of the city. In the film, piano keys are struck repeatedly, chords overlaid, stop and start; they mimic the flow of night to day and day to night as the footage accumulates and as the story unfolds. Cut to flashback. A temporality all of its own. For the philosopher and literary critic Avital Ronell, culture’s own addictions must also surely be mapped. “Discipline and addiction.
Practice your scales. Repetitions. Bach on coffee. Berlioz on hallucinogens (but also on coffee and cigars): The Witches’ Sabbath, a concoction of Faust and the opium dreams that Berlioz read in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Mussorgsky’s wine, Stravinsky’s cigarettes.” Whether yesterday or today, observing the pain of others almost always comes served with a side dish of romantisme noir.
– Anya Harrison
Variation II, 2025
Video, sound, 6’ 42”