CROSSINGS II
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien
Crossings is a series of works discussing the notion of the threshold. With all – but one – works positioned on the floor, the exhibition substitutes the focus from visuality towards corporeality and movement, transforming the rooms architecture into a somatic obstacle course.
Positioned at the entrance and turning it into an administrative check point, a pair of transparent cookies on an aluminum tray reflect the bodies of visitors, temporarily inscribing them within a partition of red horizontal lines. As they cross the exhibitions’ threshold, their shadows are fugitively disciplined into an institutional measurement syntax and a predetermined score.
On the floor there are two pairs of sandcast glass feet casts : one pair rests against the wall, bound in copper wire – an elemental conductor of energy here wrapping the pair of feet up, in a gesture of storage or archival.
The other pair freezes a movement in space, in an arrested choreography step.
A glass bubble contains the machine-washed, pulped remains of Histories by Herodotus, the origin point of categorizing the Mediterranean world into an archive of victors, written by the foundational architect of Western historical narrative or “Father of History”. Trapped inside a vessel embodying the absolute fragility of the breath,as a biomorphic vitrine the work shifts the locus of history from the monumental permanence of the state to the temporality of the living body. Memory becomes bounded by the ephemeral link of a human respiratory act and the foundational historical text reduced back to matter, asking what happens to the political imagination when we physically un-write the foundational texts of Western sovereignty ?
As the text of Histories is erased by a machinic procedure, another one is recreated : in the text distributed in the exhibition, “Windows”, history is here produced in a flat, senseless, void of meaning syntax generated by a predictive algorithm, equating the historical trauma of enslaved women with the customization of a Windows tablet.
CROSSINGS II
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien
Crossings is a series of works discussing the notion of the threshold. With all – but one – works positioned on the floor, the exhibition substitutes the focus from visuality towards corporeality and movement, transforming the rooms architecture into a somatic obstacle course.
Positioned at the entrance and turning it into an administrative check point, a pair of transparent cookies on an aluminum tray reflect the bodies of visitors, temporarily inscribing them within a partition of red horizontal lines. As they cross the exhibitions’ threshold, their shadows are fugitively disciplined into an institutional measurement syntax and a predetermined score.
On the floor there are two pairs of sandcast glass feet casts : one pair rests against the wall, bound in copper wire – an elemental conductor of energy here wrapping the pair of feet up, in a gesture of storage or archival.
The other pair freezes a movement in space, in an arrested choreography step.
A glass bubble contains the machine-washed, pulped remains of Histories by Herodotus, the origin point of categorizing the Mediterranean world into an archive of victors, written by the foundational architect of Western historical narrative or “Father of History”. Trapped inside a vessel embodying the absolute fragility of the breath,as a biomorphic vitrine the work shifts the locus of history from the monumental permanence of the state to the temporality of the living body. Memory becomes bounded by the ephemeral link of a human respiratory act and the foundational historical text reduced back to matter, asking what happens to the political imagination when we physically un-write the foundational texts of Western sovereignty ?
As the text of Histories is erased by a machinic procedure, another one is recreated : in the text distributed in the exhibition, “Windows”, history is here produced in a flat, senseless, void of meaning syntax generated by a predictive algorithm, equating the historical trauma of enslaved women with the customization of a Windows tablet.