SMART
Project Space | 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam
requests the
pleasure of your company at the exhibition opening of:
TAUTOLOGY |
May 6 – Juni 10, 2001
Work by Caros Bayala, Ulli Knall, Szuper Gallery,
Tiago Carneiro da
Cunha,
Ben
Pruskin. Curated by Lennaart van Oldenborgh
Opening Reception May 5,
21:00h
TAUTOLOGY is not the same
exhibition twice. It exhibits work from artists
for whom tautology is a
strategy, a visual and conceptual device.
Tautology in this case is not
limited to the strictly semantic sense of a
repetition in meaning, but it
encompasses 'visual tautologies' (favoured
for example by Andy Warhol and
René Magritte) and imaginary constructions
that rely on duplication or
circularity to set up two or more terms with
equivalent meanings. In a
rhetorical sense, you could say that tautology
is an argument that 'explains'
itself by restating itself.
Carlos Bayala uses visual duplication to
address questions of visual and
narrative perception. His recent work
"Anima" is a four-panelled video
projection depicting farm animals that have
been dressed up in painterly
renditions of themselves. By layering two
different media, painting and
video, Bayala draws attention to the fact that
the horse 'inhabits' its
photograhic image (or videographic image) in much
the same way that, in
this case, it inhabits its own painterly
image.
Ulli Knall makes ceramic sculptures of Shapeshifters: aliens that
can
change their shape to take on a human (or humanoid) form.
Shapeshifting
can be seen as a metaphor for sculpture itself: manipulating an
'alien'
material to look human, or at least like something it isn't.
But Knall's
work also raises quesions about the duplication of identites that
are
possible in a world in which self-transformation has become the
norm.
Szuper Gallery has functioned as a free-floating gallery
environment since
it emerged from the financial ruins of the 'real' Szuper
Gallery in Munich
a few years ago. It is run by a group of artists who
use the gallery name
as a metaphor for an art practice within an
institutional context; they
have become a parasitical
gallery-within-a-gallery which sponges off other
institutions to examine the
function of artists and art institutions in
society.
Tiago Carneiro da
Cunha shows "Monolith", in which he presents the lyrics
of Robbie
Williams' "Millenium" in the manner of the opening graphics of
"Star
Wars". With a title that refers to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A
Space
Odyssey", Carneiro da Cunha invites the viewer to consider the
contrasts
between contemporary popular culture and the grand visions of the
future
which the prospect ot the turn of the millenium inspired in the
past.
Ben Pruskin is showing a new installation that combines classical
music
with a host of multicoloured monitors in an otherwise bare and
sterile
space. On one of the monitors words appear one by one in
varying speed,
forming a text that seems to keep turning back on itself, like
a circular
story in which the beginning is simultaneously the
end.
TAUTOLOGY is an exhibition in which repeating something means
changing that
something. In each of the works in this exhibition,
circular or repetitive
constructions alter the 'first readings' of the images
(and texts)
involved, and in doing so put forward questions about the nature
of
artistic conventions (and by extension about the nature of
language). It
is one approach to prise open the fabric of language,
creating room for
voices that otherwise couldn't be heard.
Sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam,
Mondriaan Stichting, Mentrum, Brand
Bier.
SMART Project Space |
www.smartprojectspace.net
1e
Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, NL-1054 BW Amsterdam
Opening times:
Tuesday-Sunday 12.00-20.00 hrs.
Post Office Box 15004, NL-1001 MA
Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 427.5951 / 5952 | Fax.: +31 20 427.5953
Email:
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