It is on “the other side” where the symbolic matrix that gives life to these works is found. The other side—the realm of dreams, emotions, intimacy, and silenced cultures—being not governed by European rational norms, offers a greater connection to “the real” as an irreducible and unrepresentable force from logical systems and closed codes. From their different intimacies, the artists in this collective exhibition show how the experience of the marvelous takes place. When this happens, attention, numbed by cultural norms, awakens, and the gaze broadens its sensitivities, integrating “the other” into the map of a magical reality.
The fragile, vulnerable to transformation, and even breakage, becomes a supporting structure in Nora Aurrekoetxea’s work. The braiding pattern turns hair filaments into a strong weave or structure. Composed of a multitude of hard and elastic units, the braid symbolizes everyday life and strength. Isolated from the body that wears or creates it and reproduced in bronze, it totemically refers to spaces of intimacy and care, revealing the marvelous in its apparent simplicity.
Sarah Bechter reveals the ontological density of soft and tender worlds, conjuring them in vaporous landscapes that subvert the visible vs. invisible antagonism. Thus, the reality that escapes the dualistic hierarchy of the Western mind, and that does not wish to unravel its nature, claims its existence. Using transparency, Bechter finds a place in the representational space for affections that arise through touch, in everyday and domestic environments.
A polyphonic weave of knowledge and traditions, fetishes, projections, and echoes is expressed in the work of Michael and Chyian Ho. Navigating between voices as communicating bodies, they deploy a mode of attention that allows them to interpret both the most audible frequencies of Western hegemony and traces of other sounds whose power disrupts the landscape. Their artistic practice relaxes the modes of perception of the Western ego to attend to the mystery of a world that appears as real as marvelous.
Working with the transfusions that occur between day and night, wakefulness and sleep, Augusta Lardy explores the dreamlike. Like a continuum, shared reality and the intimacy of dreams appear in permeable, hybrid stages. In her paintings, color composes the emotional sense of ritual scenes where the subject abandons the identitarian. Lardy places faceless bodies in “other” scenarios that, not participating in social cultural norms, could be called magical.
Sara Torres
Universidad de Passau, Alemania
