Claire Fontaine
02 Jun - 14 Jul 2012
CLAIRE FONTAINE
Abstraction ≈ Violence
2 June - 14 July 2012
It might seem unusual to perceive abstraction and violence as closely related. But violence mostly is the result of indirect orders given from a remote office, from a keyboard, or a telephone; it can be the consequence of a law approved in a room of an institutional building by some people that don’t know anything about the concrete effects of their decisions on the bodies that will experience them.
The most recent economical crisis is a blatant example of this type of abstraction that pervades the whole economical sphere but reaches its peak within the financial market.
How assets become toxic and how this toxicity translates into profit for few and total ruin at the scale of entire countries is something readable on a computer screen, where figures made out of pixels translate into evictions, job losses, impoverishment and marginalization.
In her third solo exhibition at Dvir Gallery Claire Fontaine challenges the contemporary implications of abstraction mainly through a reflection on painting. The series entitled Tactical Entry faithfully transcribes the representation of the cones of action of weapons held by two armed people breaking into a rectangular room with two entrances. The presence of these geometrical figures on the canvases resembles the visual language of suprematist painting but in reality it is just the result of the schematic representation used by the armed forces in order display dangerous movements in the space.
The paintings will be hung on a scaffolding structure that will run around the gallery. The use of scaffolding indoors materializes a fragility of the white cube and at the same time strongly evokes the street. This sculpture that adapts its size and shape to the different spaces where it is presented is entitled Jungle Gym in reference to the urban practice of working out on scaffolding. In the centre of the space will be suspended Untitled (Vanity), a double sided mirror turning on itself with one magnifying side in which the viewer can see oneself within the context of the exhibition but upside down.
Two videos will be shown that can be read as allegories of social violence. In the first part of The Assistants poet Douglas Park reads Giorgio Agamben’s text that bears the same title, while in the second part he remains silent during an equivalent amount of time. Agamben’s The Assistants describes imperfect and fairy creatures, messengers of a truth that they can’t themselves understand. In the second part of the video, Park’s face appears as a landscape crossed by different weathers. It reflects a nudity and a disarmament to the world that make explicit the fact that he himself is one of those creatures described in Agamben’s essay. The concept of the assistant, as it emerges here as a watermark, is at the heart of Claire Fontaine's project. Not only are these beings translators and foreigners, but they are obscure characters whose indecipherable help allows things to get done. In the messianic economy mentioned by Agamben, awkwardness, shame, undisclosed desires will be our pledges for salvation. Everything with which we painfully cohabit today will actually allow us to access greater closeness with ourselves in an aftertime, that we can imagine being the time of revolution.
The video Situations paraphrases a street fighting instructional DVD and invites the visitor to reproduce the same gestures. In a Brechtian device, the actors constantly interrupt themselves in order to comment on the movements that they are showing us; at the same time, through this explicitly pedagogical process, they make their gestures reproducible by anyone, as much by our friends, as by our potential enemies because they redistribute their knowledge indiscriminately. They realize thus Brecht's program, which was to make gestures "quotable." The actors are filmed in a white cube, in conditions of spatial and temporal abstraction, although some of the techniques displayed come from Krav Maga, the Israeli Self defense system and are here described outside of their political context.
A suspended neon greets the spectator when exiting the space, it reads “freedom” in Arabic and it is at the same time the materialization of a wish and the crystallization of many hopes.
Abstraction ≈ Violence
2 June - 14 July 2012
It might seem unusual to perceive abstraction and violence as closely related. But violence mostly is the result of indirect orders given from a remote office, from a keyboard, or a telephone; it can be the consequence of a law approved in a room of an institutional building by some people that don’t know anything about the concrete effects of their decisions on the bodies that will experience them.
The most recent economical crisis is a blatant example of this type of abstraction that pervades the whole economical sphere but reaches its peak within the financial market.
How assets become toxic and how this toxicity translates into profit for few and total ruin at the scale of entire countries is something readable on a computer screen, where figures made out of pixels translate into evictions, job losses, impoverishment and marginalization.
In her third solo exhibition at Dvir Gallery Claire Fontaine challenges the contemporary implications of abstraction mainly through a reflection on painting. The series entitled Tactical Entry faithfully transcribes the representation of the cones of action of weapons held by two armed people breaking into a rectangular room with two entrances. The presence of these geometrical figures on the canvases resembles the visual language of suprematist painting but in reality it is just the result of the schematic representation used by the armed forces in order display dangerous movements in the space.
The paintings will be hung on a scaffolding structure that will run around the gallery. The use of scaffolding indoors materializes a fragility of the white cube and at the same time strongly evokes the street. This sculpture that adapts its size and shape to the different spaces where it is presented is entitled Jungle Gym in reference to the urban practice of working out on scaffolding. In the centre of the space will be suspended Untitled (Vanity), a double sided mirror turning on itself with one magnifying side in which the viewer can see oneself within the context of the exhibition but upside down.
Two videos will be shown that can be read as allegories of social violence. In the first part of The Assistants poet Douglas Park reads Giorgio Agamben’s text that bears the same title, while in the second part he remains silent during an equivalent amount of time. Agamben’s The Assistants describes imperfect and fairy creatures, messengers of a truth that they can’t themselves understand. In the second part of the video, Park’s face appears as a landscape crossed by different weathers. It reflects a nudity and a disarmament to the world that make explicit the fact that he himself is one of those creatures described in Agamben’s essay. The concept of the assistant, as it emerges here as a watermark, is at the heart of Claire Fontaine's project. Not only are these beings translators and foreigners, but they are obscure characters whose indecipherable help allows things to get done. In the messianic economy mentioned by Agamben, awkwardness, shame, undisclosed desires will be our pledges for salvation. Everything with which we painfully cohabit today will actually allow us to access greater closeness with ourselves in an aftertime, that we can imagine being the time of revolution.
The video Situations paraphrases a street fighting instructional DVD and invites the visitor to reproduce the same gestures. In a Brechtian device, the actors constantly interrupt themselves in order to comment on the movements that they are showing us; at the same time, through this explicitly pedagogical process, they make their gestures reproducible by anyone, as much by our friends, as by our potential enemies because they redistribute their knowledge indiscriminately. They realize thus Brecht's program, which was to make gestures "quotable." The actors are filmed in a white cube, in conditions of spatial and temporal abstraction, although some of the techniques displayed come from Krav Maga, the Israeli Self defense system and are here described outside of their political context.
A suspended neon greets the spectator when exiting the space, it reads “freedom” in Arabic and it is at the same time the materialization of a wish and the crystallization of many hopes.