calendario eventi  :: 

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2/11/2006

Eclipses du reel

Fri Art - Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg

Peter Aerschmann, Sven Augustijnen, Ryan Gander and Marco Poloni

This exhibition, entitled Eclipses du reel, eclipses of reality, aims at investigating our modes of cognitive and sensory perception while highlighting aesthetics of disappearance in an alienating world. Exploring worlds between image and sound, fiction and reality, the visible and the invisible, the works of Peter Aerschmann, Sven Augustijnen, Ryan Gander and Marco Poloni attempt to probe through simulation the irreversible loss of meaning and communication linked to the disappearance of critical thinking and to the rise of certain forms of censorship. E'clipses du re'el is an exhibition which attempts to stimulate the viewer by combating the erosion and desertification of a world which hides and disguises its commitments under a blanket of deception and pretence.

Marco Poloni pursues this investigation in an identity-based quest in two works, The Desert Room (2006), a series of photographies, and an installation, The Desert Hotel (2006). The first version of The Desert Room was organised by Pierre-Andre' Lienhard at Plug In in Basel in 2005. The artist subsequently revised it for Fri-Art, by including as well other interfaces. In a recently published article, Lienhard writes: “The Desert Room is not only an apparatus which offers an observation anchored in our reality as visitors, it is also a backdrop which plunges us into double-decker fiction. The computer and the TV SET evoke the context of current media manipulation." The room is an accurate reconstruction of the room inhabited by the reporter Locke in a hotel in the North-African desert in the film The Passenger (Profession: Reporter), shot by Antonioni in 1973. Film and its procedures are a recurring reference for Poloni. This film, particularly so, since it deals with perception enclosed in borrowed visions. In this hotel room, Locke, trades his identity against that of an arms dealer, found dead in a neighbouring room. He escapes the truth of his failure with the camera, to completely lose himself in the fiction of a new self.

The room in the desert is also a room which has been deserted. The disappearance of the reporter is echoed by the disappearance of our image on the screen. The Desert Room establishes a mirroring effect between different levels of fiction and reality. The figure of the reporter is one of these mirrors; it embodies our position as an observer of reality in constant interaction with fiction. Our absence within the image frees us from all figurative expression and allows us to explore semi-transparencies between these levels. Passengers of the infrathin, we are summoned to perceive ourselves as perceiving." Theatrum Mundi (2006) by Peter Aerschmann is an interactive installation which ties in with the tradition of the stage arts, converging not only on the void, but also on the vanity of the human comedy. The artist makes use of two projections to confront two closed worlds in a polarized new world order. One transcribes live feed information and news downloaded on the Internet through press agencies such as Reuters or Swissinfo in real time. The other focuses on day-to-day life in all its mundane aspects taken from normal life.

The First Grand National (2003) by Ryan Gander at first plunges the viewer into a dark room. Then, confronted by a first sensory reduction, the subject-perceiver furtively discovers the colour bar of a TV screen projected against the wall of a space circumscribed by a sound system. The position of the monitor - a plain BRIONVEGA “algol", designed by Zanuso and Sapper in 1964 - is inverted and diffuses a colour bar which transposes a reduced representation of the world in true colors. With this work, the artist aims to overstep the monitor’s original function by validating not only its material quality, but also its ideal, nonexistent image. This unreal matrix is coupled with a feminine voice, which narrates the transition from radio to television and focuses on the issue of memory.

With stringent irony and sharp criticism, Sven Augustijnen draws in L’e'cole des Sven pickpockets (2000) a doomed world, in which the victim is no longer prey to his predator. On the contrary, the disappearance of the object becomes the act of a pickpocket, reenacted by a magician. The reversal of a situation through magic supplants reality and uncovers an inscrutable world.

This exhibition is an existential meditation about the impossibility of knowing reality and accepting the unbearable precariousness of the world. Does the viewer not become both actor and observer, confronted with his own incapacity to embrace a world that is both real and unreal? By disappearing, do eclipses perhaps reveal and denounce a hidden reality?

Image: Marco Poloni, from Shadowing the Invisible Man, shooting script for a short film, 2001. Color photographs mounted on aluminium, each 8 1/8 x 10 5/8 in.

Opening, November 3 at 6:30 pm

Fri-Art
Petites-Rames 22 - Fribourg
Opening hours : Tuesday-Friday 14-18h, Saturday-Sunday 14-17h, Thursday evening 18-20h
Guided visits : Thursday, November 9 and 23, 2006 at 19h and by reservation

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