SMART Project Space on Fri, 15 Jun 2001 23:33:42 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-nl] SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE |
SMART Project Space | 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam requests the pleasure of your company at the exhibition opening of: SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE | Mark Bain, Elisabetha Benassi, Voebe de Gruyter, Stephanie Kratz, Jacqueline Pennell, Hideyuki Sawayanagi, Yokomizo Shizuka | Curated by Samuel-Fuyumi Namioka. Saturday June 16, 21.00 hours - late | After opening party with deejay Arnold. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrap in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman - But who is that on the other side of you? (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Even as we step into a new millennium, many spectres we inherited from the last century are still haunting us. Though postmodern doubt has proceeded to rid itself of what the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has called 'grand narritives', (such universal categories as History, Truth, Art, etc.), they are still persisting in the present as shadows of our thoughts and actions. Such ghosts of history also exist in the small narratives of our daily lives, as expressed in the above quoted lines of T.S. Eliot. The text is inspired by the account of an Antarctic expedition. Eliot explains in his original note: "It was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member then could actually be counted". This awareness of an unreal presence could be thought of as the testimony of an otherworldly existence in our physical world, but it could also be attributed to causes of psychological nature. Feeling the presence of an absent person can occur for example after somebody has died, or can be caused by a delirious state of being. But there are many other forms of shadow lives that live among us. The power of memory to transport us out of the present to people and places long past plays an important role in experiences of unreal presence. It is related to a notion of time that is not linear, but opens up a spatial simultaneity in which unrelated events become connected and exist together. Sometimes memories can be more real then the present as the French writer Marcel Proust experienced. In Remembrance of Things Past he relived his own past through the act of writing. As happened with Proust upon dipping a Madeleine in tea, it is the seemingly insignificant objects and events that can become a doorway to past times. The works in this exhibition survey different aspects of such experiences of unreal presence in the small narratives of daily life. SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE is sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam, Mondriaan Stichting, Mentrum, Brand Bier, Beam Systems, Yakult Europe BV SMART Project Space | www.smartprojectspace.net Exhibition Space: 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20 Office: Keizersgracht 720, NL-1017 EW Amsterdam Mail to: P.O.Box 15004, NL-1001 MA Amsterdam Phone: +31 20 427.5951 / 427.5952 Phone/fax.: +31 20 420.6028 Email: info@smartprojectspace.net If this e-mail was forwarded to you by way of someone other then SMART Project Space, and you would appreciate to receive further mailings announcing exhibitions at SMART Project Space, you can send mail to info@smartprojectspace.net with the following command in the body of your email message: "subscribe e-mailing SPS" If you would want to remove yourself from this mailing list, you can send mail to info@smartprojectspace.net with the following command in the body of your email message: "unsubscribe e-mailing SPS" ______________________________________________________ * Verspreid via nettime-nl. Commercieel gebruik niet * toegestaan zonder toestemming. <nettime-nl> is een * open en ongemodereerde mailinglist over net-kritiek. * Meer info, archief & anderstalige edities: * http://www.nettime.org/. * Contact: Menno Grootveld (rabotnik@xs4all.nl).