I AM THE OTHERS AND THE OTHERS ARE ME

 

Juliane Ebner, Gary Hill, Olga Kisselova, Maria Marshall, Mariana Vassileva

Curated by Boris Kostadinov

 

I Am the Others and the Others Are Me tries to explore the specifics of video, film and digital forms placed in a new historical macro environment  which is reflecting personal artistic practices. This process of exploration does not go through the classical paradigms implied by the legacy of Pike and Warhol, examining the use of the video as a "capturing" the power of television or the propaganda pathos of cinema. This project seeks to provide a possible concept of the contemporary applicability of the media. The aggressive penetration of the Internet has completely changed our understanding of democracy, along with the artistic, intellectual, activist, social and political aspects of the media and the ideas that could be represented through it. The "democracy" of the Internet has allowed a fragmented, non-homogeneous and controversial perception of processes in our societies. However, the more important problem lies in the fact that these specifics have long left the field of virtual and today they define the processes, the relationships and the norms of communication.

I Am the Others and the Others Are Me collects video works that seek to find answers to the personal emotional and intellectual mythologies of the invited artists. Paradoxically or not, the process of seeking the emotional or artistic "self" is determined by the plurality of the "Others". This turns into our natural "mirror" - in a daily routine where we face a huge amount of heterogeneous facts. The path to the personal "hidden" world goes on the path of the "shameless" exposed states of others in the global digital bubble.

We find this in the work by Mariana Vassileva (premiere). In her film, an anonymous man in an anonymous hotel room is trying to escape the maze of the fate. The logical narrative is deliberately broken by semi-imaginary fictions referring to what actually happened.

Maria Marshall also explores the fine line between the autobiographical and the imaginary. Her alter ego character erases the word “God”. The removal of “God” brings us back to the blank canvas of the blue sky and perfect snow, back to ourselves, from where we are able to make our own traces. 

Gary Hill examines the complications and meanings of language and concepts. Artists daughter reads Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color, Part 1 in real time.  The artist first modified the book by replacing all philosophical, psychological and scientific terms as well as proper names with phonetically spelled versions and then asked his daughter to negotiate every word the best she could. Consequently, the meaning and inflections of pitch and pauses go “in and out of sync” with unexpected turns.

Juliane Ebner works with the history. She does not treat the past as a psychoanalytic session but as a mass of real facts related to the fates of several generations. The traumas determine choices made by the representatives of these generations.

When Olga Kisseleva was invited to do a performance at Louvre Lens, she analyzed the layout of the museum. If a curve that could reunite the exterior angles of each one of the modules were to be traced, one would be able to see that one of these ideograms, which structures the building, is the mathematical sign for infinity. This work presents a hypothetical and critical view on the museum's institution which is based on the idea of "eternity" of the art works.