the interpretation of dreams
Photographs by Jorge Molder
27 January to 9 April 2010 -
at the Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre Paris
The photography of the Portuguese artist Jorge Molder evokes a world in which memories are interwoven with apparent recognition and dream with meta-reality. His exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris shows three sequences of his work: The Small World (2000), You Don’t Have To Tell Me Anything (2006/07) and his recent the interpretation of dreams, on show for the first time.Jorge Molder often uses his own image, transforming it to suggest atmospheres that transcend the everyday environment of his life, and staging venues in which people he imagines can appear – his doubles, no doubt, different from him, yet not completely foreign to him. They open on to Otherness. At the same time they link him to his cultural memory – to the films, the literature, the painting and the philosophy that nurture the universe of his art – the universe to which his photography constantly refers.
THE EXHIBITION
The three sequences presented in the show can be read in the light of a conceptual heritage stemming from surrealism and, beyond that, from psychoanalysis. Compulsively, Jorge Molder peoples an arena in which chance confronts necessity, the concrete confronts the abstract, and emergence confronts dispersion, seeking passages between two worlds: the ludic and the tragic.
The Small World The story told in The Small World could be read as a rite of passage. Isolated in his studio, a character sketches a schematic drawing. Nothing in its face is significant. Nothing enables us to infer its future movements or intentions. Repetitive postures obstinately display, as it were, the enigmas of a quest for memory. A phantasm, it takes us through the obsessive process that constitutes what we often take to be identity.
You Don’t Have To Tell Me Anything Film is not merely the territory of the imaginary for which Jorge Molder has a predilection; it also serves as a reserve of images. Thirty-one different films are the origin of thirty-two pictures in which movement and immobility are paradoxically synthesised both in the protagonists and in the staging of each shot.
the interpretation of dreams borrows the title of Sigmund Freud’s epoch-making work published in 1899, founding the psychoanalytical paradigm linking neurosis, dream activity, culture and civilisation in general. The unconscious, dream and instinct also play a key role in the work of Jorge Molder, in his constant search for a passage between dream and waking, idea and the body, reality and its appearances – the two sides of the mirror.
the interpretation of dreams is also the title of the exhibition as a whole for an obvious reason: the crepuscular character of each image.
THE ARTIST
Jorge Molder was born in Lisbon in 1947. After graduating in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, he held his first exhibition of photographic work in 1977.
Subsequently he has had numerous individual shows in Portugal and abroad. He has taken part in collective exhibitions, such as the 22nd Biennale of São Paulo (1994), the 48th Biennale of Venice (1999), the Schwarze Quadrat (Homage to Malevitch) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007), Artempo – Where Time Becomes Art, at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2007), and Jan Fabre – Le Temps Emprunté, at the Palais des Beaux-arts in Brussels (2008).
He lives and works in Lisbon.
Curator: Leonor Nazaré, CAM / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
The catalogue of the exhibition comprises reproduction of all photographs on show and articles by Leonor Nazaré and Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego.
Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre
51, avenue d’Iéna, 75016 Paris
Ph: +33 (0) 1 53 23 93 93
Monday to Friday 9 am to 5:30 pm
Saturday (1st February to 31 March) 1 pm to 6 pm
Press contact: jasmin.uhlig@gulbenkian-paris.org, 01 53 23 93 78
