Rites without Myths
Said Atabekov, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, Yelena Voroboyeva and Viktor Vorobyev,
Lin Yilin, Artur Zmijewski
Curated by Ilari Valbonesi
Until 30 October 2010
Via Montevideo 11
20144 Milan, Italy
tel. +39 02 48 00 89 83
info [at] impronteart.com
The Impronte Contemporary Art gallery is pleased to present the RITES WITHOUT MYTHS group show with works by Said Atabekov, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, Yelena Voroboyeva and Viktor Vorobyev, Lin Yilin, Artur Zmijewski. The exhibition is curated by Ilari Valbonesi.
The exhibition Rites without Myths explores the ritual character of contemporary art, where works have no specific beginning, but are rooted in a recurrent experience: art is the rhythmic event thus consigned to the self-organized practice. Already the title reneges on the grand, legitimising “narration” of the myth, whether personal or collective. Further we have a new generation of artists who stage functioning intentionality through a strategic use of repetition, already an intermodal form of order. Naturally, these are works of strikingly unique style, this however can be ascribed neither to a universal order of space and time nor to an egocentric approach aimed at making art an “individual mythology”. It is rather the artist who operates in function of the work, assuming the role of officiant in the rite: the ambiguous foundation that nevertheless gives a rhythm on what is ordered. Transfiguring codified symbologies and traumatic events, art is thus “rite without myth”, a symbolic repetition, ironic art, anarchy, the work’s continuous engenderment on the temporal plain and within the deformation of existing orders.
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Said Atabekov (Bes Terek, Uzbekistan, 1965) presents the installation Gengis Kan’s Shroud (2010). The patient reconstruction of blossoming poppies is an example of mimetic art prior to language, a “passive synthesis” between victim and executioner, the hidden symbol of every empire. Indeed, the red flower is the pattern of a large panel, the perceptive field analogous to seasonal flowering, which represents, in an undetermined present, the overflowing blood of the fallen in battle at the hands of Genghis Khan: the leader would scatter seeds of the plant to honour the fallen and mark the passage through the Twilight Zone.
With the The Silent Maker (2010) installation by Egill Sæbjörnsson, (Reykjavik, Iceland, 1973), the apparent simplicity of glass objects reflects upon itself the composure of silent, daily space. The show unfolds through a rotary movement intersecting the projective quality of light, and the expansive quality of sound, creating an extraordinary environment of synaesthetic venue between rupture and renewal, and the beginning of a new way of seeing and listening.
Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio (Pozzuoli, Italy, 1972) uses given materials and everyday objects to give life to Untitled (2010), a real “dream-like” fountain of thought towards perception. The running of water is sound and vision of distracted attention, concentration and dispersion. It is always-already being dislocated and reconstituted in an infinite process, similar to a life of conscience indifferently flowing in the dialogue of latent and manifest containment, diachronic patency.
In Winter Subliminal Object (2004-2010) by Yelena Vorobyeva (Nebit-Dag, Turkmenistan, 1959) and Viktor Vorobyev (Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, 1959) condensation procedures are activated through the rite of tea frozen in images. The ice teapot burns on a flame: it is an imaginative synthesis, which condenses the verbal processes of burning and melting, of container and contents, the sparkle of truth back to the things themselves.
The brick is the least common denominator in a multi-dimensional dialogue in the works of Lin Yilin (Guangzhou, China, 1964): the symbolism of the wall, architectonic transformation, construction of society, urbanisation of the masses, production techniques, democracy. These ideas are played out on the artist’s body in the performance, A kind of Machine called Liberation (2003) where he lies on the ground covered in a tangle of bricks, and where a cyclist, hindered by the same construction, is engaged in the struggle of deconstruction between opposing forces. In the images of Chronicle (2009), the artist is walled in a square in Brussels, awaiting the paradoxical freedom from the past, negotiated with the interpretation by Others. 80064 (2004) is the title to the film by Artur Żmijewski (Warsaw,1966) which recalls the number tattooed on the arm of ninety-two year old Józef Tarnawa, a former Auschwitz prisoner. It is an ethical reflection on conformism . The artist persuades Tarnawa to retype the number 80064, re-enacting the fate of subordination .
