Chapter III. Doubling
Leda Bourgogne, Kim Farkas, Lito Kattou
Leda Bourgogne, Kim Farkas, Lito Kattou
Chapter III. Doubling is the third and final iteration in a series of exhibitions presenting different strategies that artists employ to challenge the nature of images. Chapter III. Doubling brings together the work of Leda Bourgogne, Lito Kattou and Kim Farkas and reflects upon the double, a visual representation of the darker surpressed parts of the human psyche in psychoanalysis, and the coalescence between a virtual and actual image.
Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. (…) It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.
-Jeff Vandermeer, Acceptance / The Southern Reach trilogy
Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. (…) It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.
-Jeff Vandermeer, Acceptance / The Southern Reach trilogy
13.11.24—30.01.25
GIANNI MANHATTAN, Wassergasse 14, 1030 Vienna
> Installation views
Chapter III. Doubling is the third and final iteration in a series of exhibitions presenting different strategies that artists employ to challenge the nature of images. Chapter III. Doubling brings together the work of Leda Bourgogne, Lito Kattou and Kim Farkas and reflects upon the double, a visual representation of the darker surpressed parts of the human psyche in psychoanalysis, and the coalescence between a virtual and actual image.
Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. (…) It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.
-Jeff Vandermeer, Acceptance / The Southern Reach trilogy
Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. (…) It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.
-Jeff Vandermeer, Acceptance / The Southern Reach trilogy
A mirrored wall divides the gallery space into two chambers. Reflective surfaces are a recurring feature in Leda Bourgogne’s practice and she utilises this material to distort and double the viewer. As with Bourgogne’s interventions, the dividing wall in Chapter III. Doubling creates a doppelgänger of the gallery, works within it and the bodies that circulate the space. Bourgogne’s drawings are mounted on the headboard of a plushy pale blue bed frame and contain writhing shapes, spider webs, tendrils of smoke and tentacles. Here, Bourgogne’s double is in alliance with the spirits and phantoms, a psychoanalytical mirroring causing the differentiation between animate and inanimate desires.
Entering the second chamber, everything is soaked in a green murky light. Lurking in the margins amongst the green haze is Carrier, Lito Kattou’s insectoid sculpture made from laser cut aluminium and nickel-plated woven baskets. Kattou’s protagonist, part silhouette, part cosmic explosion takes it’s origin from “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay Ursula K Le Guin wrote in 1986, which questions the hunters spear’s phallic, murderous logic and instead tells the story of the gatherer’s carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. Kattou’s double is the para-possible, an alternative genealogy in which the storytellers, the gatherers wove the fabric of society.
The LED composite sculptures of Kim Farkas punctuate the gallery space and inhabit, like muted beacons, each side of the mirrored wall. His hybrid, symmetrical forms and their chromatophore-like surface suggest an omnipresent metaphysical current, a bioluminescent and imperceptible language being ever present. Farkas’ works exist in the elsewhere of the world, in densely layered shadow, in afterthoughts, in spheres of remembrance and in that haunted place in which beings are both departing and stirring to enter. Their double is the mask that a face shelters behind amongst the chaos of information, a glistening, evacuated, Rorschach husk.
