“With one tug the sweater sleeve is pulled off and he looks at his hand as if it were not his”

Sometimes, the unsettling insight dawns on us that it is not always easy to recognize ourselves. A stranger looks at us from a distant mirror or a shop window – and it turns out to be no one else than our own reflection. Or, reversely, we look at ourselves in a mirror and the more we focus our attention, the more we look unlike ourselves, as in a Gestalt shift that ends up unfolding a totally new picture of us. The same applies to the world around us, which often appears to the observer in forms surprisingly un-identical to itself.

In Cortázar’s No one is to blame, the main character struggles to pursue the banal act of putting on a sweater, gets entrapped in its enclosed space, performing an unintended pathetic dance during the unwanted intimacy with the sweater and his now seemingly alien body. The fact that we cannot escape from ourselves can be as claustrophobic and hopeless as in the story. At the same time, the feeling of dissociation that invades the protagonist as he sees his own hand suggests an interesting prospect. Namely, that it may be possible not only to observe these somehow mysterious disruptions and draw a map of them, cartography of a un/safe region, but to play and engage with them, to transform them as magicians, or/and tricksters.

This exhibition seeks to explore the ways in which such gaps open up in our experience in general and in artistic creation in particular. We will playfully inquire into, experiment, document, but also shed light on and take care of the differences and dislocations that arise in our everyday dealings with the world and ourselves and often go overlooked, unnoticed.

ARTWORK

The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world.

– Orwell, G. 1984.

YEAR: 2017

MEDIUM: Picture postcards

SIZE: 177.6 x 10.5 cm

EDITION: Open edition

Each of the 12 postcards will be signed, addressed, and mailed out by post to the collector. The collector may choose to have the whole postcard set mailed at a specific date, or each individual postcard mailed on a different day or month as per the collector’s request. This act adds a performative quality to the work.

GROUP EXHIBITION: as if it were not ours

DURATION: September 16 - October 8, 2016

PRESENTED BY: pon ding, Taiwan

CURATED BY: Nobuo Yoda

ARTISTS: Juka Araikawa, Jasmine Little, Maxmilian Fedyk, Krister Olsson, Xiang Yun Loh, and Nobuo Yoda

*Images courtesy of the artists and pon ding.