(english below)
olet tässä tilassa ja katsot itsesäsi heijastuksena jostakin muusta, kaikesta muusta. kun valot laitetaan päälle, huonekalut liikkuvat hieman. kauanko tuolla aallolla kesti osua minuun ja miten se hajosi osuessaan ja minäkin hajosin hieman. miten minua ei voi erottaa siitä aallosta kun olen samassa tilassa samaan aikaan. miten persoonapronomini vaihtui sinusta minuun ja maskuliinisesta feminiiniseen ja yleiseen. miten näin itseni sinussa ja sinut minussa. miten meidän atomimme väreilevät todennäköisissä sijainneissaan ja sekoittuvat. seinät, lattia, katto ja kaikki mikä niiden väliin jää. kaikki mitä siihen tilaan tulee ja mikä siitä poistuu. minuun on osunut. olin hetken se, joka luulin olevani ennen kuin ymmärsin, etten ole se joka luulin olevani.
Galleria Rajatilassa 30.6.-17.7.2018
B-Galleriassa 24.10.-18.11.2018
näyttelyn toteuttamista on tukenut Taiteen edistämiskeskus.
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being in this space looking at your reflection from something else, everything else. when the lights are turned on, the furniture moves a little bit. how long did it take for that wave to hit me and how it broke hitting me and I broke a little too. how I’m inseparable from that wave, inhabiting the same space simultaneously. how the pronouns slid from you to me and masc to fem and general. how i saw me in you and you in me. how our atoms vibrate in their likely positions and intermingle. the walls, the floor, the ceiling and everything between them. everything that enters that space and everything the exits. i’ve been hit. for a moment i was who i thought i was before i realised i wasn’t who i thought i was.
Rajatila gallery June 30th – July 17th 2018
B-galleria October 24th – November 18th
the exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Entanglement
Looking at me you do not see me for I can not be seen. You see a reflection of light from the surface of the constellation that is considered to be me. The seeing is a physical occurrence in your eyes and brain. What is considered to be you is contaminated by what is considered to be me and vice versa. The light traverses between us, the air, the molecules, atoms, electrons that belong to neither of us or anyone or anything particular. Everything in you seeing me is an assumption. I can not be seen because an I is a subjectivity and a subjectivity is a happening, not an object reflecting light.
No object, just a material setting for audio and visual stimuli to provoke a drift in the subject-object divide. The way the light reflects and diffracts and meets your eye and the sound your ears and gravity your mineral skeleton, this is a unique, yet inseparable moment in the flux of existence. Electricity and technologies are present actants in this operation, together with the space within the gallery walls and the institution and tradition of contemporary art.
The mirrors perform an effect of removal. The viewer’s position of separate subjectivity to the objects of art is removed by breaking the surface of the video projection with mirrors. The reflection in the mirrors is broken by other mirrors. The viewer will always affect what is being seen by either blocking the projection and being projected on, or by being seeable in the mirrors.
The soundtrack is produced live by a modular synthesiser in a corner of the room. Some parameters are predefined by the patch, but happenings within those parameters are somewhat random within the physical capabilities of the synthesiser. No visitor will hear the exact same soundtrack. No visitor of any artwork has the same experience, even when the elements appear to remain unchanged. Everything the viewer brings into the situation affects the experience. The physical position of the viewer in relation to the artwork, their background and prior knowledge all affect the artwork’s coming to being in a local moment of time.
The multiply reflected and splintered images bring forward the way memory affects our experience. Being in the present is layered with memories of the past and projections of that into expectations for future. Surfaces have something solid to different degrees behind them; we assume this based on having encountered similar surfaces before. We expect touching them will feel similar to touching similar things before.
Unlike the audio, the video is a digital recording of past events. Nevertheless, the organised light coming through the lens of the projector is light that has never existed before. It is generated by electricity and ordered into resemblance of previous events by bits. The particular moment is always happening for the first time, the particular waves of light and sound reaching the visitor always do so for the very first time, even if similar things have happened before.
On the video we see a dog and a human in different environments, being with the environment, theirselves and each other. A dog is our closest nonhuman other on the same scale with us. We have evolved together for at least 10000 years, affecting each other. Through our relationship with dogs and everyday environments we can go further to investigate the place of nonhuman actants in our lives and our lives as not separate from those actants. Such actants are the technologies of art, minerals, fossil fuels, food grains, internal micro organisms, etc. A dog can be a gateway to understand nonhuman experience. Another human can be a gateway to understand the subjectivity of another. Understanding our existence as networked and intertwined with everything else will reduce our tendency to resort to subtly and overtly violent ways of being in and with the world.
Camille Auer 