“…Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland )
Twisted Reality
Animation is a form of allegory. It promises a momentary distancing from reality — and then, with wild imagination and imagery, it leads the viewers to a head-on collision with their beliefs and expectations. Its ability to present this search for true meaning of self and portray the fantasies that lie at the heart of the subject is boundless. Every idea or concept that it touches on spreads its wings and becomes a symbol capable of mediating and liberating, and under its influence even the most documentary images may be transformed into metaphors of the imagination and soul. But at the same time its allegorical power stems from its inherent connection to children’s stories, folklore, and comics. It is deeply rooted in popular culture, both Eastern and Western, and so has become a universal language expressing the climate, traditions and aesthetic and contextual expectations shared by the collective all.
This exhibition examines the choices made by these artists in response to events transpiring around them — the reality of violence, power, exploitation, hatred, and alienation — through their use of the language of animation. This language allows them to challenge accepted imagery, encourages the invention of innovative, untamed and subversive forms of expression while also offering a constant mirror that reflects reality. The exhibition includes interdisciplinary works that also combine animation along with animation films from local and international artists. The dialogue between the medium of animation and other forms of expression stretches the limits of the language of art and demands that we re-examine the familiar concepts of space, movement, color, image, and representation in relation to the making of art.
This complexity of metaphor that guided us in our choice of works for this exhibition is anchored by two diametrical opposites — that of violence and empathy. The strength of these animated metaphors, typically characterized by humor and absurdity, lies in their personal-artistic voice, which is evidenced in their aesthetic choices and the dialectic that they present. The works can be divided roughly into three groups — those that rely on certain factual events, those that sketch out a conceptual abstraction and those that stage theatrical/cinematic situations that establish mythological worlds with rules and codes of their own.
Does art have the power to respond to these oppressive and violent systems in any significant way? Is it part of the socio-political mechanism or is it detached from it? How does it avoid becoming a mouthpiece for these systems? The Dada movement, a response to World War I, believed the answer lay in flouting accepted codes of art and culture and encouraging a visual and contextual revolution, while breaking with tradition and developing new, challenging and disturbing art forms that would combine experimental elements of montage and cinema: “Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all its sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality” (From ”Dadaist Manifesto”, Berlin, 1920 ).
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