Impression of performance-intervention
VILA. Torn documents (digital prints on paper)
Details of LARA
Laminated cards used in VIPrA and VIPhA interventions
Pillar with torn corners of LARA documents
Detail of VILA document corner
gie: VILA, LARA, VIPrA, VIPhA
gie was a group show that was arranged by the Kestnerlabor as the 24th MHH Kestnerschau. Together with Judith Crasser and Tarik Kentouche, I conceived a site-specific exhibtion for the space at the Hannover Medical School. I presented four interrelated performative intervention-installations, namely VILA, LARA, VIPrA and VIPhA.
gie.
g - i - e
[ gi: ]
Gie
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Encapsulated in their own entropic system, big, clumsy Pilates balls roam the space. We were able to identify three states there: Firstly, it is the outside where we loose ourselves through external stimuli. Inside we are engulfed in a hyper, internal consciousness. Then lastly, in passing, we experience the alternation between these extremes.
But does it move? The shimmering and shining, frozen hake fillets, I mean. Its vivid materiality imbues the image with dynamism. It is a crystal clear phenomenon that transports us elsewhere—somewhere muddy.
In a parallel realm, lost paper corners dangle from a pillar. What seems to be an attempt at a hyper-systematic elicitation of semantic substance, turns out to be a rather arbitrary process of conjecture. It is a perpetual, autopoietic process of denotation and evaporation—producing thereby semantic fragments and material traces. The knowledge that they were once visual documentations of the space has been lost.
There is yet another painterly system unfolding in the space. Drawn in a rapid, we are not sure whether to float or to sink. Live performers simulate the arcane through interpretative display and their formational movements. The turbulence of perception and signification keeps us afloat.
In order to be able to see the invisible and to be able to understand the incomprehensible, we believe it is important to adopt both a phenomenological and semiotic stance in viewing the gie-nexus.
© 2021 Gert Pretorius