Oneiriography
03 Jun - 03 Jul 2010
ONEIRIOGRAPHY
Simon and Tom Bloor, Michelle Deignan, Ruth Ewan, Ragnar Kjartansson
curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak
03 Jun - 03 Jul 2010
It was a glorious bright day, you remember. The preterite day; then never again spoken of, not directly. The proscenium: a room, what of a place where no one ever lived, the walls mostly blank, an off sort of noncolour. Definitely hazy corners pasted with gum and solder that breaks with the blunt shoulder of the sun. From outside, either a bar from a passing gramophone of a song half recognised or mollusc shells dropping on concrete.
To rephrase Stephen Dedalus, history is a dream from which we have yet to awake. From sleep to the presentness of waking, towards the representation, construction, portrayal, moulding, transformation and distortion of dreams, the dream (Greek, oneiros) is also a whole spectrum of proxies: aspirations, ideals, unrealised thoughts and unexplained lands.
‘Oneiriography,’ curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak, brings together the work of Simon and Tom Bloor, Michelle Deignan, Ruth Ewan, and Ragnar Kjartansson in an attempt to mark the blurred, unknown distance between what is and what has come before. Rather than the dominant, Freudian understanding of both dreams and history as an encoded ‘royal road to understanding’ that creates a causal chronology, the artists here question the shared narrative desire of history and its dreams, exploring its displaced remnants and supposed dead-ends. Shards of reconstructed stories and possible historical occurences partially emerge, tracing the ripples of absent and elusive events. ‘Oneiriography’ is a historiography of dreams, an ambiguous space in which the past is reconfigured in an attempt to open up new meaning for the present.
With assistance from The British Council.
Simon and Tom Bloor, Michelle Deignan, Ruth Ewan, Ragnar Kjartansson
curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak
03 Jun - 03 Jul 2010
It was a glorious bright day, you remember. The preterite day; then never again spoken of, not directly. The proscenium: a room, what of a place where no one ever lived, the walls mostly blank, an off sort of noncolour. Definitely hazy corners pasted with gum and solder that breaks with the blunt shoulder of the sun. From outside, either a bar from a passing gramophone of a song half recognised or mollusc shells dropping on concrete.
To rephrase Stephen Dedalus, history is a dream from which we have yet to awake. From sleep to the presentness of waking, towards the representation, construction, portrayal, moulding, transformation and distortion of dreams, the dream (Greek, oneiros) is also a whole spectrum of proxies: aspirations, ideals, unrealised thoughts and unexplained lands.
‘Oneiriography,’ curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak, brings together the work of Simon and Tom Bloor, Michelle Deignan, Ruth Ewan, and Ragnar Kjartansson in an attempt to mark the blurred, unknown distance between what is and what has come before. Rather than the dominant, Freudian understanding of both dreams and history as an encoded ‘royal road to understanding’ that creates a causal chronology, the artists here question the shared narrative desire of history and its dreams, exploring its displaced remnants and supposed dead-ends. Shards of reconstructed stories and possible historical occurences partially emerge, tracing the ripples of absent and elusive events. ‘Oneiriography’ is a historiography of dreams, an ambiguous space in which the past is reconfigured in an attempt to open up new meaning for the present.
With assistance from The British Council.