VOLUMES OF STONE
The exhibition takes place in the context of “curated by_vienna 2013: Why Painting Now?”. The project initiated by departure – The Creative Agency of the City of Vienna takes place in 20 leading Viennese galleries from October 10 through November 14., 2013.
How do we locate ourselves between thought and representation? Imogen Stidworthy’s practice considers the physical and social impact of language, and its role in the formation of the self. Her art, which often combines various media such as video, photography and audio, engages primarily with the voice, and with various technologies for generating data and representation that point towards latent forms of perception, experience and meaning. Stidworthy’s exhibition at Galerie Raum mit Licht presents recent projects that examine the interpretive use of sound as a process of visualisation. Together the works could be considered as a set of “portraits”. On the threshold between visualisation and abstraction, they formulate complex questions around the re-forming of identities and the representational possibilities for the image, when one’s parameters of perception have changed. In context of curated_by, these works can also be understood as a reflection on the dialogue between new visualising technologies and more historically rooted image technologies, such as painting and cartography.
Stidworthy’s installation Sacha (2011-12) reflects on the politics of listening, elucidating ways in which power operates within visual and sonic regimes. Combining different components that form an audio and visual environment, Sacha portrays on one screen Belgian wiretap analyst Sacha van Loo, a person who has been blind since birth and who works for the police analysing voice recordings made during the surveillance of suspects. He understands space through acoustics and his highly developed echolocation skills also identifying speech and the unspoken intentions or meanings in dialogue through his fluency in numerous languages and dialects. In a second video – which could be considered as a deconstructed painting, freestanding in the gallery – the eye is drawn through the virtual space of a 3D laser-scan of an urban area. This most precise mapping of surfaces involves no optical technology and works on a principle that is closer to how we hear than to how we see. This technological image in relation to the reality of Sacha’s listening and blindness, suggests different paradigms for how we conceive of and form images.
Two separate but related light-box images extend the focus on forms of imaging and expanded notions of portraiture, from the viewpoint of the internal. The first, Scan (2013) is another 3D laser-scan ‘point cloud’ rendering of the surface of a single, used brick from a virtual interior perspective. The second, Untitled (3”18) (2010), is a high-resolution archival museum photograph of the brick, which is presented in dialogue with a sound composition of the voices of two men, whose relationship with language has been effected by physical or psychological damage. D is a veteran of wars in Bosnia and Iraq who has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Tony O’Donnell has aphasia, which effected his structuring of language after a stroke. Their words are based on an extract from W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, which describes a personal memory of the ruins and reconstruction of Berlin in 1947.
Text Nav Haq 2013