The Observer Effect

ADN Galeria

March 20 - May 22, 2021

 

You can find the catalog at this link:

www.amazon.com/dp/B091D2RLTV

www.amazon.com/dp/B091D5MD6K

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-observer-effect/id1565829550

 

ADN Galeria presents the fourth solo exhibition of mounir fatmi, an artist whose artistic work and research focuses mainly on language, architecture and the machine.

The exhibition we are now presenting, The Observer Effect, brings together a series of recent productions through which the artist explores new ways of creating from paradigmatic elements that have been present in his work: analog technology and the written word. The title refers to the theory of quantum physics by which the observer influences the observed matter. Something similar to what is known in psychology as the Hawthorne effect that establishes modifications in the behavior of individuals in response to the self-awareness of being observed. Similarly, Marcel Duchamp declared: "I sincerely believe that painting belongs to both the spectator and the artist." With these references, mounir fatmi asks the viewer to submit to observation in an unusual way; look and be seen from another point of view, transforming and altering the works in a game of reciprocity.

 

The installation Already Dead 01 has been specially made for this space. For it, he uses VHS tapes, an obsolete medium to copy and transmit images, creating a black stain that spreads through the walls and the floor of the room invading the spectator's space and creating a kind of hallucinated dimension with which he must face. The VHS, freed here from its original function, works as an element of distortion and abstraction that questions the notions of media exposure and mass reproduction developed by Guy Debord in his book "The society of the spectacle", and with the reproduction and repetition techniques used by movements like pop art and minimalism. Already Dead 01 questions the ways in which contemporary art examines the relationship between image and society, warning about the ability to manipulate images on the viewer.

 

Other pieces made from the VHS material occupy the entrance space. It is the Propaganda series that, like monochrome paintings, explore the relationships between communication and propaganda.

 

This project is based on how the origin of mass communication coincided with the popularization of video recording, which managed to enter millions of homes reaching the consciousness of a huge number of viewers. Another common technological material in fatmi's work is coaxial cable with its clamps. An example of this is the sculpture Racines 08, a wall relief made with white antenna cable used by the artists to represent the decorative ornamentation of traditional Islamic art and at the same time to Jackson Pollock's dripping paintings. This work presents an aesthetic trap to the viewer who is lost in the entanglement of the cable in which beginnings and ends are not identifiable. The white on the white wall also suggests an erasure, a blank box that questions the concept of roots as a cultural stereotype defined by the individual's place of birth.

With The Observer Effect 01 the artist faces us with an insurmountable obstacle. The horse jumping bar emerges from an urn marking with its verticality the impossibility of overcoming it. Jump bars are a recurring element in the formal vocabulary of mounir fatmi. The artist approaches this element from multiple angles: aesthetic, perceptual and physical, conceptual, existential and socio-political. It can evoke both the readymade and pop and constructivism. Installed in a way that hinders the visitor's physical progression, The Observer Effect 01 works like a trap, like an obstacle facing the resistance and complexity of the world against the body. Alongside this is Peripheral Vision, a series of four black and white photographic portraits where we see mounir fatmi himself from the front, from behind, and from the sides. His face partially disappears behind a large geometric measuring instrument through which we see only the artist's eyes. The montage recalls the futuristic aesthetic while the different approaches reveals a way of renewing the gaze, a new awareness of what connects us with the world around us and with its limits. However, what Peripheral Vision highlights are the deficiencies of aesthetic language and the inability of the artist to translate his ideas. Added to this is the importance of the viewer's gaze, which temporarily reverses his position with the artist by making the latter an attentive observer of the public passing through the room. 

 

Finally, Coma Manifesto is a sculptural series of large metal plates. In these plates the letters that we read through their absence pile up at the foot of the work like rubbish. The text belongs to a fragment extracted from the Manifesto written by the mounir fatmi himself: My tongue is a hemorrhage, I bleed every time I speak. One end of the plate rests against the wall, the other on the floor, with different angles of inclination, creating a play of light and shadow and projecting the text on the walls of the exhibition space.

 

In The Observer Effect, mounir fatmi presents a journey full of traps; an austere space in which the viewer is confronted with works that question the power of the image and encourage reflection on the harmful effects of hegemonic discourses on history, interpretation, memory and identity.

 

ADN Galeria, March 2021