The exhibition, Temporally, seeks to explore how the preoccupation with real or imagined architecture – in life and in art – offers a prism through which to investigate the contemporary preoccupation with themes of identity and culture. In doing so, this exhibition attempts to probe the relationship between reality and its representations; between concrete existence and its manipulation; and between strategies of action, resistance, documentation, examination and acceptance. Operating in different manners and in different contexts, the artists participating in this exhibition create situations that investigate and challenge habitually unquestioned, concrete aspects of reality; these aspects are the platform upon which they operate, and in relation to which their works evolve. The works thus contain various and at times even strange actions, which are performed before the camera. These actions revolve around carefully constructed and reconstructed acts of representation, which dramatize or rearrange reality in order to document, manipulate, examine, read and criticize it.
Many of the works in this exhibition transcend circumscribed spheres of discourse and meaning, and make sophisticated use of the gaps between them. The first sphere of discourse is that of reality – the sphere of the ”origin” or of the (imagined) truth that is thematically – albeit not always visually – evoked in these works. A second sphere of discourse is the art field – the sphere of ”reproduction” or of ”fabrication,” which assumes a different form in every work. Yet these two spheres are paralleled – and perhaps even superceded in terms of importance – by a third sphere, the sphere of reception, in which the works are examined and where their meanings are constantly renegotiated. This sphere – which allows for a conceptual gap, or tension, between the original and concrete performance of an action (such as the explosion of a project building in Ilana Salma Ortar’s work) and between the performative reenactment of an action (such as in the work of Wang Wei) – is the sphere in which the exhibition unfolds. In this context, various forms of architecture and processes of construction and destruction – which appear to be a central theme in the works included in this exhibition – acquire a meaning that exceeds the context of the immediate architectural discourse they signify.
Indeed, the complex concept of ”identity,” which may perhaps even be replaced at times by the concept of ”belonging,” is broken down in this exhibition into small and constantly mutating fragments that cannot be fixed and defined. Different temporal contexts and places, personal experiences and national affinities, chance occurrences and states of consciousness all cast flickering shadows upon the meaning of this term, preventing us from grasping onto it in a definitive manner and from fixing our gaze upon it – and thus paradoxically enabling us to contemplate it in a more profound manner.
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