Reconnecting with the World: About the Poetic in Elements and Materials
31.10.2018 — 13.01.2019
Opening: Tuesday, October 30 2018, at 7 pm
“A purely intellectual world view without mysticism is an absurdity.”
Erwin Schrödinger
The artists participating in the exhibition “Reconnecting with the World”, Hicham Berrada, Lucy Dodd and Sam Falls, seek out our basic existential parameters and thus try to demonstrate our connectedness with an all-embracing whole, showing new ways of reconnecting with nature and the world. They create their works embedded within a historical moment of a progressing disconnection from physicality and the conditions set by time and space, perpetuated by the use of digital devices.
In an age when seemingly endless knowledge about the earth is available as data, numbers, and accumulations of facts, a deeper understanding of the coherence of life seems to have been lost. Given the contemporary insights of the natural sciences, it has become more necessary than ever before to combine its complex knowledge with new narratives in order to create a sense-giving conception of humanity in dealing with the world.
The different artistic approaches of Hicham Berrada, Lucy Dodd and Sam Falls meet common ground in their aim to understand the world by examining and understanding materials, elements and fundamental mechanisms of action to engage with them in an artistic way. In their practice, time is stretched or condensed, the cycle of day and night is inverted and regularities within the world are put on display. The works of these artists unfold from a resonance with the materials that are part of our lives. The artists use natural phenomena, activate temporal processes, and work with organic substances. Their work develop by tracing the transformation processes that the respective materials undergo, they become signs of the perpetual cycle of becoming and decaying. Art, similar but different to natural science, raises the question about how thing relate, to fathom the experience of human existence and our desire for a relationship to our environments. Given the contemporary insights of the natural sciences, it has become more necessary than ever to combine its complex knowledge with new narratives in order to create a sense-giving conception of humanity in dealing with the world. The uniqueness of art lays in its potential to reconnect knowledge and myth to open a holistic and poetic gaze upon life, the world and all that we know about it.
Starting from an in-depth exploration of the materials’ behaviors, their works use art’s capacity to cast humans into the structure of the world and sketch out a new kind of connectivity to the processes unfolding within it. The artistic works by Hicham Berrada, Lucy Dodd and Sam Falls are located at the intersection of aesthetic expression, applied sciences, and practical philosophy. In their poetic investigation of nature, they seek out forms capable of representing how everything came to be the way it is.
Curator: Franziska Nori
