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8/5/2009

That Obscure Object of Desire

offiCina, Beijing

Curated by Monica Piccioni

Inspired by the title of Luis Buñuel’s 1977s’ film “Cet obscur objet du desir”, the new group exhibition opening at offiCina space in Beijing Factory 798 on May, 9 2009 showcases works by British-Indian, Chinese, German and Italian artists. Stylistically different, the artworks convey each artist’s personal aesthetic of the ‘object’ as a subject of art and a vehicle to extended meanings.

Representing the object and its re-use has marked some very important moments of modern and contemporary art from the historical avant-gardes to our days. By recontextualizing or subverting the object, artists have emphasized the ambiguity of the representation renovating and desacralising the work of art. Objects offer an inexhaustible repertoire of forms and the notion of ‘object’ is basically ambiguous as the word refers to several meanings. An object is anything that is visible or tangible and is relatively stable in form, but it is also the end toward which effort or action is directed; goal; purpose. In Buñuel’s film, two actresses alternating on the scene perform the principal female role and ‘object of desire’.

They are constantly contrasted to highlight the duality and ‘obscurity’ of the theme. This exhibition moves from the dichotomy between the real object and the represented object addressing its ambiguous status and manifold aspects. Artists refer to objects in multiple ways and perform thought-provoking ideas reusing them into their artworks. This discourse on the object is also a pretext to open up a debate on the question of when we see something, when we do not see something, what we think it is. The ‘object’ explored in each piece in the exhibition shows an area full of nuances, duplicity, and subversive flare; a seductive field to investigate the interplay between thought and vision. In other words, it is the power of art that visualizes what lies behind and beyond the ‘fabric of things’. These objects suggest the extent to which the meaning of this subject matter may be fluid and play upon ambiguity.

“Kunstwerke 36” derives from a dream of the artist. This video work by Italian artist Alba d’Urbano quotes - through the mechanic dance of German performer Tina Bara - Martha Rosler classic feminist video “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975). Here the subconscious is the starting point for the creation of an artificial (real) world. The performer presents viewers with small household appliances through unexpected gestures that depart from the normal use of tools and seem to follow the guidelines of an unusual instruction manual. The setting is not a real one but the slow motion images of 1960s’ 007 films and interiors of 1970s’ apartments. In those years, women started to familiarize with new multipurpose objects created for the house. Frontally shot, the robot-like movements of the performer follow the tune of Ide Hinze’s “Okay” that adapts the fragments of a lesson by American poet Allen Ginzberg. The household objects presented in mechanical succession are turned into small enemies opposing the identity of the woman who slowly homologates with the indefinable background losing her characteristics. The performance subverts the everyday objects that thus become functional to the discourse of objectification. The end of each new scene interrupts the rhythm with a sudden and explosive ‘break’: maybe a refusal of such schematisation.

Another video performance shows a different and again interesting rendering of the object. The author, Kiran Kaur Brar is a young British artist of Indian origin whose practice reveals her interest in questioning the notion of identity and challenging the idea of a fixed political and cultural position. Her looped video work “Passport Lahloh” (that translates ‘come and get your passports’) documents a happening, which took place close to the border between India and Pakistan. Setting up a temporary stall at the market, the artist offers obviously fake British passports to a quickly gathering crowd. The crowd responds with calm dignity, but what viewers see is an unsettling, quietly powerful scene referencing the complex politics of place, foreign policy and economics. By juxtaposing cultural and emotional elements, this work attempts to create hybrid encounters and looks into expectation. It draws upon illusion and the ambiguity between real and false. The real object and the art object coexist in a tension that gives it a peculiar dynamism. The alternating roles of the object within the specific context combine to portray it as the ‘object of desire’.

As stated in an interview with critic Carol Lu, entering Liu Ding’s world ‘you will discover that all common and familiar materials end up appearing unusual’. He thus challenges our visual experiences by transforming the physical existence of an object and making it appear in the form of something different. He participates here with two works. The small sculpture “Mushroom” materializes the idea of the longed for object into the three-dimensional shape of a mushroom created from countless little white capsules. Medicines are attractive because they promise to prevent disease and to keep the body strong, drugs allow people to dream and provide a desired escape from daily stifling life. In today’s ‘medicalized’ society, these clusters of pills perform the task to nourish our desire for safety but their shape reveals the trick, the poisonous aspect. The second work is a new photograph entitled “Art is Everywhere”. It reproduces a fridge mistaken by the artist as a work of art at London’s Tate Modern. A text recording the thoughts of the artist - similar to a meditation on this distortion - is added on the photographic object in the manner of ready-made. This work poses the questions: what is art? To what requirements must an artifact comply to be classified as a work of art? and has its place on the pathway that was opened by Duchamp (and followed by others among whom Bertrand Lavier etc…) when he questioned the boundary between art and non art. Part of a new project entitled “I Wrote Down Some of My Thoughts” it confronts with new ways of perceiving things. It is this peculiar verbal dimension that -by insinuation- involves the mind of the viewer in the perception of the work through short circuit of sight in favour of thinking.

Other photographs belong to the series “1+1” by Zhao Liang. These digital prints in black and white hold a subtle tonality akin to silver gelatin. The images are pairs of objects standing or leaning against cracked walls. Everyday items - two tattered umbrellas on a water-streaked wall, two rusting urinals, two mangy mops, and two worn coats are transformed by the artist’s camera into objects of surprising beauty. He imbues them with an oddly anthropomorphic presence, surrealist nature. Posed as if suspended in time, they seem to come from some middle place and attract the viewer toward the mute world of things, to the realm of dream and unconscious. They may suggest by association bodies absent from the scene that potentially have been there. These objects exist as doubles and even though are items of the same type; some details characterize each one of them creating the illusion of their inner humanity. The ruined setting adds to the mysterious, sombre magnetism that irradiates from them. We are gripped by the magic quality of these images, a quality we find in other works of the artist who creates a peculiar poetic from everyday life, common things and unprivileged people. In his multiform practice (documentaries, video, photography) he moves along the ridge of public space and intimate details creating metaphorical scenes of today’s life and revealing specific psychological states. While documenting everyday life he has the ability to single out and record the ambiguity that is part of the essence of human existence.

For this exhibition, Italian artist Girolamo Marri contributes “Four Flags” a sketchy reproduction of a “Three Flags” painting by American artist Jasper Johns. The piece, produced after the artist moved to China last year, includes in the picture a Chinese flag, looming dangerously behind the three American ones. It’s a strange presence, at first not noticeable but later overwhelming. Here the perspective is reversed so that the biggest flag, the most distant from the viewer, embraces the smaller Stars and Stripes in the forefront. Art is not an exception to the radical changes the world is witnessing today, as the East rises and Western declines. Reinterpreting the image of such iconic objects the artist reflects provocatively on the idea of a new world order and of new desires. Another project by Marri investigates in a different way the theme of exhibition. In Tanzania and in other part of Africa, albinos’ organs are collected and big sums of money are paid to get hold of them in illegal markets, as they are believed to be essential ingredients for various magic rituals. The organs of an albino are the same colour as those of any other human being; the series of drawings exhibited here instead represent those organs as completely white, colourless. Although they’re simple and inaccurate sketches, these drawings have been framed and exposed as if to acknowledge the intrinsic value and desirability of the depicted object. Here the aesthetic operation confers to the desired object the dual aspect of attraction and repulsion epitomized by the macabre collection.

Found objects recur in the practice of couple of artists Meng Jin and Fang Er conveying a poetic and a fantasy of space. Interested in urban life, architecture, memory, their works discuss the interrelationship between physical building, objects and their social context. In the new series of photograph “Love Hotel”, the scene is shot inside those hotels where couples go for sexual related activities. Cheaper than normal hotels, they are usually located in city suburbs, near highways, close to stations or in industrial areas. Their architecture may be garish and lit with neon lighting. However, some of them come with very ordinary looking buildings, distinguished mainly by having small, or even no windows. For many of their users, love hotels create fantasy and satisfaction feeling that their routine life cannot provide. By tying up the objects found in the room, furniture and the room space become performers the artists work with. Inspiration derives from the feeling of intimate human relation (also preserved in the room’s objects) and a sense of mystery related to these places. Other works integrate the exhibition concept. “Every Room is Illuminated” investigate the grey area between reality and perception. Printed on rice paper these photographs stage an optical illusion referring to what remains in our vision after the exposure to an intense light. Through this process rooms illuminated by intense light of chandeliers in institutional sites (all places connected to power) are cleared of all objects, only the lights and the reflection caused by lights remain visible (the afterimage). Spatial boundaries and details of the rooms are left open to interpretation. A video sequence loops inside a white TV box installation showing the ‘systematic’ confusion of a city that brings objects to the edge of their realization and drops them back into the chaos of random noise. A visualization of the process between construction and deconstruction, this animation is followed by two videos of abandoned areas in which objects appearing in slow succession or under the flash of a pale light create the sensation of a tactile space in movement. Places that have lost their dynamic as spaces can be found in a state of in-between. Objects can condense the memory of those places within the dialectic of light and obscurity.

Opening Saturday, May 9, 2009, 5-7pm

offiCina
N. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road Factory 798 (798 Middle Second Street) Chaoyang District Beijing
Tue-Sun 11am-6pm

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