MEMORY MATERIAL
viewing the works at Art Rotterdam this year
memory, handwriting, repetition and tactility appear to be the recurring motifs
that catch my interest – and houses, small, floating or pieced together
a few of the artists whose work moved me:
Jananne Al-Ani, Aerial I, 2011, archival pigment print, 145cm x 115.5cm. Aerial I is part of the show Memory Material curated by Nat Muller at Akinci gallery.
what do we see? a bird eye view of landscape with man-made traces (factories? trenches? mining?): a ruin from the past or from the future?
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Charl van Ark, ‘Berliner Lichter 10 mei 1933’ en ‘Berliner Lichter 3 april 2012’, 1.35 x 1.90 m. Phoebus Gallery Rotterdam
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Jun Yang: A Short Lecture on Forgetting and Remembering, 2011
Yuki Okumara: ” In order to slip through such a confinement, to seize back the superposition, the invisible closed room, or the black box, and to fully explore its potential, my work takes “translation” or “interpretation” as a means to come and go between self and others, here and there, and now and then.”
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the first work I saw of Miguel Angel Rios was A Morir (’till Death’) – in which black and white spinning tops performed a kind of military ballet
A Morir (Till Death), Miguel Angel Rios, 2003, Three-Channel DVD Projection. “Rìos’ video installation focuses on a popular game in Mexico that involves spinning tops. Through the documentation of this simple scenario, from one to thirty players, aged from 14 to 50, dymnamics of competition, aggression and territorialism are signaled both visually and aurally. A MORIR negotiates both politics and poetics in abstracting narratives about urban sprawl and congestion.”
The Ghost of Modernity (2012) gently superposes the modernist idea of the cube to a slum area in Mexico, asking: “Is this ghostly geometric figure a lens through which the world can be reinterpreted? Or is it the paradigmatic principle of modernist thought that organizes the world around it? Are we inside or outside the cube?”
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Kristina Benjocki, Kosmaj, photo-print, lightbox 125×185.5cm 2014, 2014. Part of the ‘ Past, less predictable than the Future’ Research 2012-2014.