ART CITIES:Luxembourg – Double Coding
The starting point “Double Coding–Collection Mudam” is Andrea Mastrovito’s work “Non ci Resta Che Piangere” (2009) that encourages us to refuse any unambiguous reading of history. When invited to exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the artist, in response to the presence of a statue of Christopher Columbus in front of the museum, decided to literally reverse the explorer’s caravel and thereby question the benefits of the discovery of America, which are very relative when one adopts the perspective of indigenous peoples.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mudam Archive
The group exhibition “Double Coding–Collection Mudam” combines various practices and focuses on how artists use events and stories (whether historical or personal) to explore them and analyse their sources but also to meaningfully transcribe them. On 19/9/1985, Mexico City was hit by a devastating earthquake, as a witness of the disaster, Carlos Amorales has vivid memories of that day, having been hit by a traumatic and emotional force and simultaneously subjected to a certain fascination at the destruction wrought on the city. With the title “Vertical Earthquake” (2010), the wall drawing conforms to an exact protocol, the open-ended repetition of the form of one of the many faultsin a building that was caused by the earthquake. Visually, it thus runs counter to the chaos provoked. For “2.2.1861” (2009- ), Danh Vo asked his father to copy by hand the letter that Théophane Vénard, a French missionary in Tonkin, in the north of present-day Vietnam, sent his father on the eve of his execution for proselytism. Through this simple gesture of copying, the work superimposes the two father-son relationships. In Phung Vo’s extremely careful writing, Vietnamese history and the family history of the artist intersect. In his work, “Non Ci Resta Che Piangere” (2009), Andrea Mastrovito physically turns the caravel sailed by Christopher Columbus around in order to challenge the endlessly repeated benefits that resulted from the European discovery of America, which are seriously challenged if the event is considered from the outlook of the continent’s indigenous peoples. Less descriptive in its form, the sculpture of Mel Chin is an attempt – on his own terms – at a psycho-morphological portrait of a lie. The enigmatic tongue that emerges from a wall is sculpted in catlinite, a material from which the peace pipes of the indigenous peoples of North America were carved, in a direct allusion to the fraudulent treaties they were offered. On the other side of the wall, physical organs hard to identify are coupled with a strangely hypertrophied sac representing the physical reaction of the body when the mind harbours a lie within it. The irony employed by Wael Shawky becomes more apparent when, as he zigzags among the aisles of a supermarket, he seems to mimic the glibness of a sales rep or the intense manner of a television presenter commenting live on a supposedly burning issue, like those that today pass continuously across the bottom of our screens. Neither an advertising rant, nor an item of breaking news, the artist gives us a cadenced account of a religious legend that is part of both the Christian and Islamic traditions. Called the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” or “Ahl al-Kahf “ it relates the story of young men who sleep for 309 years to awake in a completely different world that they are hard put to recognise. The panoramic photography by Mitra Tabrizian was taken in a then new-build residential district on the outskirts of Tehran. With its silhouettes of the inhabitants and monumental portraits of the religious leaders, it initially appears to be a classic depiction of contemporary Iranian society. Yet the use of a wide-angle lens and the fixed attitudes of the subjects combine to give the impression of a form of artificiality that the photographer’s objective gaze succeeds in piercing. In his video “The Invisible Hand” (2011) in secret Ciprian Mures¸ an binds one of his drawings into the Romanian translation of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which the artist borrowed from the library in Cluj University. Although the title of the work is a direct reference to the theories of the Scottish economist and father of the free market economy, with his action Mures¸ an is practicing a form of reiteration. We see the same mediation on existing documents in the work of Svätopluk Mikyta, who searches in second-hand bookshops and antique shops for illustrations that he alters and combines in large compositions on a bright red ground. Composed mainly of imagery linked to Eastern European communism, he cuts out, reframes, censors and scribbles on the images to accentuate the shade and contrasts, and in so doing restores these records of a past era to the status of graphic works which, as pale images on red and black grounds, are reminiscent of communist propaganda. Lucia Nimcová works with the censored rushes of Slovakian films made before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Made up to a great extent by rejected extracts from films made between 1968 and 1989, her video exudes a very outdated atmosphere.
Info: Curator: Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Assistant Curator: Lisa Baldelli, Mudam Luxembourg-Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Duration: 17/6-10/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-23:00, http://www.mudam.lu/en/accueil/
