Contemporary Art Daily

Artists: Michel Auder, Zbynek Baladran, Nina Beier, Lukas Jasansky and Martin Polak, Eva Kotatkova, Jiri Kovanda, Dominik Lang, David Maljkovic, Shahryar Nashat, Seth Price, James Richards, Ben Schumacher

Venue: SVIT, Prague; Futura, Prague

Exhibition Title: Coming to Reality

Curated by: Fionn Meade

Date: July 1 – August 24, 2014

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of videos, images, press release and link available after the jump.

Videos:

Seth Price, The Rolling Skull, 2002, video.

Seth Price, Non Speech, 2010, video.

Michel Auder, excerpt from Brooding Angels, 1988, ½” Betamax video SP and Hi8 video to digital video SD, 5 mins 11 secs.

Michel Auder, excerpt from Do You Love Me?, 2013, mini-dv and phone video to digital video SD, 10 mins 38 secs.

Zbyněk Baladrán, Channel 1 from Preliminary report/case study, 2013, HD two-channel video, 10 mins 53 secs.

Zbyněk Baladrán, Channel 2 from Preliminary report/case study, 2013, HD two-channel video, 10 mins 53 secs.

Eva Koťátková, Performance documentation of Theatre of Speaking Objects: Picture atlas of Antonín, a boy who cut the library of the clinic into pieces,  June 25, Performed by Sebastian Baalbaki, Hanka Turečková, Marta Vítů

Images:

Video and images courtesy of the artists; SVIT, Prague; and Futura, Prague. Photos by Martin Polak.

Press Release:

Where to find an exit from the transcendent ego, Descartes’ infamous Cogito ergo sum? How to see a turn from consciousness grounded in Kant’s “I”, the One as analytic self-consciousness becoming a systemic rational?

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a vocal critic of Descartes in his own time) was exiled from his own Sephardic community of Amsterdam as a young man for decrying the existence of a providential God. Subsequently, Spinoza used Ladino, the Spanish idiom spoken by Sephardim, only once in his written work, to introduce the archaic phrase “pasearse” which literally means “to walk-oneself.” A loose translation into modern Spanish would be “pasear” or “dar un paseo,” to take a walk, but the archaic form insisted upon by Spinoza is both agent and patient, active and passive, an infinitive that refers the agent to herself as immanently present and therefore cause: “to visit oneself” and “to show oneself visiting.”

Why is this important? Because it is the split of self without duality that Spinoza claims in “pasearse,” a turning outward and inward at the same time, the becoming of self in the infinitive form, a coming to. But how far we are from Amsterdam! Wrapped in our new reality—one composed of images—the blind spot of moving at the same speed now makes us one. Marketable. Marketed. Mined. Me. Kein Eingang.

And still the dead dream of the low-living share. Crossed eyes, look again. Crossed mouths, felt again. Bad copies all of them. It’s the burn of it calls us forward, second nature. Coming to.

– Fionn Meade

Link: “Coming to Reality” at SVIT and Futura

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