The Judgement is the Mirror is a group exhibition which opens on January 19th at 5pm at The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik. The exhibition curated by Henk Slager features works by Tiong Ang, Roger Palmer, Jan Kaila, Japo Knuutila, Clodagh Emoe and Mick Wilson. It addresses the potentialities of visual languages that critically investigate in what way the Other, or alterity, can be imagined as agonistic judgement while the mirror of identification of the Lacanian symbolic order still hovers in the background.
Central themes in Tiong Ang’s artistic thinking are collective memory, exclusion, localization and globalization. His work Pavilion of Distance deals with states of consciousness and the human body as the reluctant container of the manipulativeness of the media world. Tiong Ang shows how media not only denote our concept of reality but also affect our perceptions of places and events.
Clodagh Emoe’s research project Mystical Anarchism tries to mobilize novel formations of artistic thought through affect. Drawing on strategies associated with rituals, the framework of events emerges as a paradigm where normative structures could be symbolically suspended. Specific objects such as platforms and banners are created and function in staging those events. The objects demarcate temporary forms of gathering and attest to the potential of collective imagining.
Historical archives and found objects, with the silent knowledge they contain, are central to the work of conceptual artist Jan Kaila. He does not present these imageries as such, though, but interprets them photographically as moving images or installations. Through his interpretation, Kaila shows in the work The Sleepers a new aesthetic and intellectual vantage against already established facts.
A similar strategy, albeit from another media perspective, can be found in the work of Mick Wilson. His audio recordings rework familiar religious sources and hymns. There is an apparent attempt in the work Around the Food Thing to rethink and re-use, from an atheistic perspective and from the political possibility of counter-imagination, the languages of, and the longings for transcendence inscribed in these sources.
Roger Palmer deploys historical fragments as source material. In his works, he observes the viewers’ relationship to language and images. Palmer uses various materials: photographs, paintings, texts, and sculptural elements. The distance, provided by history, turns Palmer’s installation Banana in its natural habitat into a space for different allegories and unknown stories where all phenomena connected with life are in a process-like movement.
In his research project Situation in Osh, photographer Japo Knuutila studies globalization and our opportunities to act as humans. In the past decades, Knuutila has worked on different borderlands; ports, closed industrial areas, freighters. Situation in Osh speaks in a language characteristic of media imagery. Knuutila’s images discuss the possibilities of language and interpretation, as well as the grey area of absence/presence and inclusion/exclusion without attempting to visualize reality as such.
As an exhibition, The Judgment is the Mirror shows a mutually inspiring interaction between different forms of artistic language, historical narratives, and medium specific reflections by criticizing reductive iconographies and archival reasoning, while subsequently offering alternative forms of artistic thinking and counter-imagination.
That interaction indicates exactly the junction where a topical art education and its responsibilities should be situated. The title of the project is derived from Dalis Car’s album The Waking Hour (1984).
During a forum at The Iceland Academy of the Arts on Saturday, January 19th at 1-4:30 pm, the participating artists will delve further into how and why the above problematics should be part of the institutional framework of the art academy today. The forum is open to public.
Tiong Ang is a Dutch artist born in Surabaya, Indonesia. Roger Palmer is from the United Kingdom, Jan Kaila and Japo Knuutila are from Finland and Clodagh Emoe and Mick Wilson from Ireland. At different stages they have all been involved in artistic research alongside and associated with their artistic practice. Many of them hold academic positions and all of them work internationally.
The Living Art Museum
The Judgement is the Mirror
Skúlagata 28, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland
www.nylo.is
Opening January 19th 2013 at 5pm
Duration January 20th - Mars 24th 2013
Opening hours Tuesday-Sunday 12-5pm.
Forum:
Iceland Academy of the Arts, Department of Fine Arts.
Laugarnesvegur 91, 104 Reykjavik
Saturday January 19th, 1-4:30 pm