There has been a miscalculation
There has been a miscalculation
The installation 'There has been a miscalculation' is part of an ongoing
investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and reality. Relying
on the viewer's processes of association, this work aims to pose the following
questions: Since we are living in a time period that has been exhaustively
investigated by science-fiction literature and films - how do we make sense of a
present that doesn't resemble the fictionalized image? Is there any relationship of
correspondence between the futuristic reflections of either progress or doom that we
came to expect, and the reality of today? Is there a productive role for inaccurate
predictions, and broken expectations?
-Julieta Aranda 2007
Together with the artist Julieta Aranda, Ersta Konsthall continues to explore the
notion of fiction and reality. Julieta Aranda focuses on our apprehension of
existing structures and how these structures are represented.
By working with different media - installation and video as well as tabloids and
crosswords, Aranda undermines the functionality and signification of language.
Words alone are not enough to produce meaning and to describe a situation. The
German Literary Theorist Wolfgang Iser, who died earlier this year, wrote that voids
and gaps in a text trigger a game with the reader where the reader himself is forced
to complete the text. The act of reading becomes performative, intrusive and
demanding. The potential of the text, says Iser, lies in the reader’s will to play.
The gaps in the text become opportunities for the reader to enter and start to act.
Those gaps and voids become appreciable in Julieta Aranda's crossword puzzles. She
collects words like literary souvenirs - from science fiction, art theory books and
pornography - and combines them in thematic and geometrical patterns. The meaning of
the new text arises in the tension of the words and the unfilled squares.
Julieta Aranda is one of the founders of e-flux video rental. Her tabloids and
installations have been shown in group shows and biannuals across the world, among
others at the 9th Lyon Biennial and the 1st Biennial of Architecture and Landscape,
Gran Canaria. She received her MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts, New
York. Julieta Aranda was born in 1975 in Mexico City.
Image: A newspaper on the relevant subjects of criticality and complaint, edited by Julieta Aranda and Carlos Motta.
Ersta Konsthall
Erstagatan, 21 - Stockholm