Underneath / Ghosting

Déreway to Basel

September 18 - November 15 - 18, 2010

 

Underneath

 

Underneath is a special project for the Sharjah Biennial 8 based on a former architectural work by Mounir Fatmi called Oval Project, and a video entitled Horizontal Fall, showing the deconstruction of a building.

 

With Underneath, the main idea is to show the world literally upside down. Since 9/11 the balance has totally changed and a new force has emerged in the geopolitical landscape as we know it. The threat and the power come from the Eastern part of the globe and for the first time in centuries, the western countries have to adapt to this new situation. Everybody knows now that the Earth is cut in two by an invisible line similar to that of the equator, which divides North (rich) and south (poor. In this unstable period where money does not guarantee security, people are looking for new values to bequeath the next generation.

 

For the installation, three tables are placed in a room and under each table people can see wooden sculptures of the skyscrapers of a big modern city. Those cities generate a lot of pollution. When you look on the top, those are regular tables symbolizing the discussion area for ecological topcs. It’s a very trendy subject. But its uncomfortable to sit down at these tables, the sculptures beneath get in the way. On the wall, there are three video projections showing different landscapes (urban or natural). It’s a geographical disturbance: you don’t know where the pictures were taken and you don’t know what “paradise” we are trying to reach.

 

Are we ready to change?

 

 

Text quoted from Sharjah Biennial 8 Catalog

 

 

 

Ghosting

 

A fresco of light projected onto apartment buildings in a big city, Ghosting comprises a series of intertwined calligraphed circles, rotating with varying speeds clockwise and counter-clockwise.

 

The installation questions our relation to the world by creating connections between images and architecture, contemporary art and religion. To do this, Ghosting draws from multiple inspirations, from Arab calligraphy to contemporary art, philosophy and linguistics. It is reminiscent of Duchamp’s circular rotoreliefs – machines that created visual illusions by combining the techniques of optical art and those of the modern industrialized world. It references Wittgenstein’s work on language-games that attempts to demonstrate how meaning stems from usage and context. Finally, it questions our relation to images by summoning philosophical currents and artistic practices that place the relation to images at the heart of their preoccupations. The installation is inspired in particular by the notions of media exposure and mass reproduction developed by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle.

 

Ghosting is offered as an experiment at the crossroads of geometry, linguistics and contemporary art aiming to observe the interactions between different cultures and between the perceiving subjects and the world that surrounds them. The installation examines the way signs associate with one another to create meaning, or not; it can be interpreted as a metaphor of the modern world, like that of Chaplin’s machine, with its cogs that set each other in motion. By associating extremely diverse elements, Mounir Fatmi’s machine contributes to the elaboration of an esthetic of profusion where shapes and cultural and artistic references are rife. The work creates fascination and a hypnotic effect on viewers. It also tends to mislead them by meddling their visual points of reference and their faculties of perception and sign recognition, thus conveying the difficulty to perceive and conceive the world: the images are combined and move around until they are hardly recognizable or disappear completely, and it isn’t possible to decide whether that accumulation of images prevents the viewer from correctly analyzing the perceived phenomenon or whether it heralds the liberation of signs from the powers of society, images or religion.

 

Lastly, Ghosting calls upon the viewers’ capacity for observation and amazement by inviting them to look up and cast a fresh look on what surrounds them, to develop their reflection about the things that deeply structure our societies and condition our ways of life. The work encourages us to become aware of a urban environment where signs are everywhere and constantly appeal to our cognitive and intellectual capacities, in order to renew and transform our relation to the world.

 

 

Studio Fatmi, October 2011