How can you make and unmake an artwork, how do you give it an obvious interpretation while leaving room for everybody else to interpret it as well? The artists from the Apparatus 22 group show us how.
On Thursday, the 18th of April was the opening of the exhibition “To the reading room. We applied ourselves to mid-air visits” at Lateral ArtSpace, opening I attended. The artworks were made by Apparatus 22, a transdisciplinary art collective that explores the relationship between economy, politics, gender studies, social movements, religion, and fashion in order to understand contemporary society. The first thing you notice is the arrangement of the room. Four walls, four artworks, with the fourth one being hung from the ceiling instead of being placed in front of the windowed wall. An interesting fact about the artworks on display is that they are a deconstructed version of the original ones. The pieces were first presented in places such as Venezia, Brussels and Bucharest, while for this exhibition, only a few were selected. We know of the artworks that they are ten in total, meant to be reinterpreted by the artist, the rest of the team, and lastly, the viewer. The exhibition is both a dedication to Ioana Nemeș, member of the Apparatus 22 group, alongside Erika Olea, Maria Farcaș and Dragon Olea, as well as a way to connect with the society by letting others reinterpret the deconstructed artworks. The multitude of notes surrounding each and every art piece show that they have been put through the process of dissection many times before, each time getting put back together in more and more diverse ways. While carefully arranged, they give off an air of disorganised order, and people who visit the exhibit are invited to contribute to the already-existent notes. As for the artworks themselves, they are 4 in total, the M series, Disco Punch, Above and Beyond and Sky Naive | It Begs a Question.
The M series (Speculative Still Life) is an installation made of three pieces of floral textile, on which the artist wrote short texts describing a still life with luxurious objects: cars, perfumes, jewellery. The three pieces of textile are accompanied by three neons and, in perfect darkness, only the words can be read. DISCO PUNCH is an installation dedicated to Ioana Nemeș, who passed away in 2011, and it is made of a concrete block on which the word ‘WORDS’is printed three times, covered by a tinsel curtain and in front of whom is an oscillating standing fan. The artwork is a study in dualities and the understanding of languages. The ABOVE AND BEYOND installation is made of three poster-sized textiles with poems written in acrylic that presented an overview of the quiet revolutions:how the people dealt with life in Iran in the ‘70s, life in Romania in the ‘80s and life in London in the ‘90s, with words describing those times: girls in short skirts and makeup, parties that got shut down by curfew, STDs and illnesses. It is a religious experience, a way for people to escape the oppressive regimes and to find others like them to give them hope. The last artwork I saw was SkyNaive, consisting of three rain ponchos hung from the ceiling, part of a performance in the Netherlands, in which the artists gave away100 of them to people. On the back of the ponchos were written aggressive messages protesting advertising - a double protection: from the rain, and from the media.
In conclusion, the exhibition represents something akin to a dictionary. Where in a dictionary, the words are broken down into definitions for people to better understand them, in this exhibition, the artworks allow the same process. It is up to us, the viewers, to see, interpret and comprehend the artwork by rebuilding it inside our mind.
On Thursday, the 18th of April was the opening of the exhibition “To the reading room. We applied ourselves to mid-air visits” at Lateral ArtSpace, opening I attended. The artworks were made by Apparatus 22, a transdisciplinary art collective that explores the relationship between economy, politics, gender studies, social movements, religion, and fashion in order to understand contemporary society. The first thing you notice is the arrangement of the room. Four walls, four artworks, with the fourth one being hung from the ceiling instead of being placed in front of the windowed wall. An interesting fact about the artworks on display is that they are a deconstructed version of the original ones. The pieces were first presented in places such as Venezia, Brussels and Bucharest, while for this exhibition, only a few were selected. We know of the artworks that they are ten in total, meant to be reinterpreted by the artist, the rest of the team, and lastly, the viewer. The exhibition is both a dedication to Ioana Nemeș, member of the Apparatus 22 group, alongside Erika Olea, Maria Farcaș and Dragon Olea, as well as a way to connect with the society by letting others reinterpret the deconstructed artworks. The multitude of notes surrounding each and every art piece show that they have been put through the process of dissection many times before, each time getting put back together in more and more diverse ways. While carefully arranged, they give off an air of disorganised order, and people who visit the exhibit are invited to contribute to the already-existent notes. As for the artworks themselves, they are 4 in total, the M series, Disco Punch, Above and Beyond and Sky Naive | It Begs a Question.
The M series (Speculative Still Life) is an installation made of three pieces of floral textile, on which the artist wrote short texts describing a still life with luxurious objects: cars, perfumes, jewellery. The three pieces of textile are accompanied by three neons and, in perfect darkness, only the words can be read. DISCO PUNCH is an installation dedicated to Ioana Nemeș, who passed away in 2011, and it is made of a concrete block on which the word ‘WORDS’is printed three times, covered by a tinsel curtain and in front of whom is an oscillating standing fan. The artwork is a study in dualities and the understanding of languages. The ABOVE AND BEYOND installation is made of three poster-sized textiles with poems written in acrylic that presented an overview of the quiet revolutions:how the people dealt with life in Iran in the ‘70s, life in Romania in the ‘80s and life in London in the ‘90s, with words describing those times: girls in short skirts and makeup, parties that got shut down by curfew, STDs and illnesses. It is a religious experience, a way for people to escape the oppressive regimes and to find others like them to give them hope. The last artwork I saw was SkyNaive, consisting of three rain ponchos hung from the ceiling, part of a performance in the Netherlands, in which the artists gave away100 of them to people. On the back of the ponchos were written aggressive messages protesting advertising - a double protection: from the rain, and from the media.
In conclusion, the exhibition represents something akin to a dictionary. Where in a dictionary, the words are broken down into definitions for people to better understand them, in this exhibition, the artworks allow the same process. It is up to us, the viewers, to see, interpret and comprehend the artwork by rebuilding it inside our mind.
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