Week 147_Coalescence
Coalescence
a project for RE_ACT 2018
featuring Ewa Doroszenko, Plasticity, Lucia Leuci, João Paulo Serafim, Bahar Yürüokoglu, Daniel Van Straalen and Lila de Magalhaes
Curated by SCANDALE Project and ULTRASTUDIO
30th September 2018 - 10th February 2019
COALESCENCE : [ noun ] The act of joining together to form a larger mass or number.
Coalescence recalls an invitation to create a dialogue in between two different identities. On one hand, the online platform SCANDALE Project, and on the other, the artist run space ULTRASTUDIO. Both curatorial team are invited to select and connect artists for the Re_Act 2018 residency, to curate a two-in one exhibition.
Foreseen as a matrix, the Azores Archipelago tends to the creative and the curatorial emulsion while also, being an artwork itself. Therefore, the wild scenario of the residency is an empowering laboratory offering a context to artists and curators.
This residency stands for the exploration of the artificial and the organic experiences in a dialogue shaping this coalescence.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO FIND A PINK ISLAND
"Everybody wants to find a pink island" embodies our scenario, in the context of the Azores Archipelago which become the scenery, the quest and the search of an inner paradise through the landscape exuberance. The technological environment of today’s era pushes the boundaries and the need for intense experience, where devices and internet blur the possible limits in between reality and virtuality.
We ask, what remains from the landscape experience?
The event is no longer the landscape but its experience. As described by Jean Baudrillard the experience is already transformed into hyperreality, flirting with the simulacrum of concreteness. Hyperreality mixes the real with the imagination, therefore virtuality instantaneously submerges itself into reality. The landscape’s virtual existence becomes part of a key-word browsing history pretending to be authentic. However, the landscape is as real as simulated, irresistibly virtual yet frozen into reality.
In this exhibition, the Azores archipelago embodies the concept of heterotopia defined by Michel Foucault, a physical space where utopias come to life. This concept layers multiple territories in a localised space which normally wouldn’t co-exist. This otherworldliness, more real, more virtual, core of the experience where the landscape overflows onto the infinite Atlantic. Thus, the scenery invites the contemplation of heterotopia in the age of internet, devices, app and filters directly covering reality. Suddenly virtuality turns reality and heterotopia becomes this other space, dematerialised and paradoxically still anchored in realness.
Each work investigates the experience of the landscape through various approaches. Ewa Doroszenko’s textile work isolates the image, enhancing a digital abstraction. Bahar Yürükolgu contrasts an algorithmic vision of this consumerism era on video; and delivers her printed perception of the landscape by mixing the organic and artificial feeling. João Paulo Serafim dematerialises the natural history’s display as part of his ongoing research. Plasticity function as a research tool aiming to understand and gravitate around the condition of the contemporary human habitat.
- SCANDALE PROJECT
ALETHEIA LIES
"Aletheia lies" is an equivocal title in which the two terms denote a certain conflict of significance. Lies is to be understood in this double meaning of to rest and to lie. In this sense, the title of the project and the exhibited works place all of us in a position of doubt that What will be unveiled rests again or What is revealed as the ab-origin lies in its very revealing itself.
The artists are invited to reflect on the theme of truth, as a revelation by Martin Heidegger. Get of of oblivion, unveil. Truth manifests itself in its disclosure to the gaze of the most attentive observer. The artworks made for the residence in the Azores Archipelago, flourish in the rooms of the Museum.
Works that pulsate: they breath. Together they may form the idea of a well represented garden in the painting by the flemish master Hyeronimus Bosch "The Garden of Earthly delights" (1480 – 1490).
Artists were therefore asked to focus their attention on the visual references of the triptych in which Bosch realize a symbolic garden where human beings are represented in their carnality, confusing the idea of freedom with liberation. Truths that reveal themselves and images that unfold in a choral work in which works by Daniel Van Straalen, Lila De Magalhaes and Lucia Leuci seem not to seek boundaries. Everything is in harmony, everything seems to be developing and pulsating with life.
"Aletheia lies" is a desired dichotomy to be resolved in the same folds of the show where charm dialogues with macabre according to the grotesque solutions that transcend any sort of time and space.
EWA DOROSZENKO
Born in 1983. Based in Warsaw, PL.
Ewa Doroszenko’s floating fabric decontextualises the image from her personal online browsing experience. The print collects data which translate the artist’s graphical generated language and representation of the landscape. Artificial oceanic and sky like fragments collides into a multilayered environment.
PLASTICITY
Created in 2017. Based in Milan, IT.
Questioning humans and nature co-evolving in ways that are not under control, while approaching the problematic of mankind domestication over environment. This installation addresses the notion that humans are part of nature. However, their print is undeniably stronger than other organisms. The raw volcanic stones, witness of the islands natural history express a conflictual andambiguous relation with the human’s global aesthetics conditioned by western’s ergonomic standards.
JOÃO PAULO SERAFIM
Born in 1974. Based in Lisbon, PT.
João Paulo Serafim orchestrates the natural history tooffer a dematerialised version of the display. The installation reconsiders the paradigma of the natural and the artificial. In an attempt to contrast the gravity effect of the island and the continent around the omnipresent Monte Brasil, João Paulo Serafim stages the museum as an heterotopia, out of space and temporality acting as a scenario. This composition is part of the artist’s ongoing research.
LUCIA LEUCI
Born in 1977. Based in Milan, IT.
Lucia Leuci gathers fragments encountered during her residency in the Azores. Creating a rhythm by collecting details as part of her emotional perception. Elements such as minerals, dried flowers, bones and metal produce the artist’s own miniature exhibition, taking involving baby dolls’ body. Acting as a director the artist elaborates through collaboration a scenario involving details, mise en scène, and movement over medium such as performance, installation and photography.
BAHAR YÜRÜKOGLU
Born in 1981. Based in Istanbul, TU.
Bahar Yürüokoglu’s video investigates the reality of the landscape through internet’s spectrum. Using tools like Google and Amazon her work illustrates how key-words expose the online commodification of the Azores. Bahar Yürüokoglu reinterprets the landscape photography by including temporary man made creation in the environment, reproducing the experience through her own visual spectrum.
DANIEL VAN STRAALEN
Born in 1987. Based in The Hague, NL.
Daniel Van Straalen relates to the raincoat as a covering surface over the ancient pillars. It becomes the proof of the artist’s residency, documentation and collection towards the act of creation which surrenders to the final work. Using a gone viral image of a smiling volcano, he found his starting point. When does an eruption becomes an island, when does the viewer becomes a voyeur and when does the voyeur becomes an artist?
LILA DE MAGALHAES
Born in 1986. Based in Los Angeles, CA.
Repurposing the context of the exhibition space as the previous convent’s kitchen, Lila De Magalhaes created her own cake even if out of place. Conceived from building material as her own architecture this chaotic cake abolishes the hierarchy in between species to awake creatures of the world. The cake incarnates the body and the circle of life, behaviour and misbehaviour in this delicious cake of Eden. Symbols get twisted, turned and turned around for an endless discovery.
