Astali/Peirce, »FAULTLINES«, exhibition view

 

ASTALI/PEIRCE
»FAULTLINES«

ideAObjekt
imagEMaterial
perceptioNMemory
proxYOriginal
clotHSpectre
facTFake
tracEPresence
deprivatioNFutur

There has to be an inherent break in the fusion of contradictions. Especially when contradictions are based on each other, but can never, by definition, be the same, like theidea of a dog and a dog. This fusion of the signifier and the signified is one of the extraordinary basic conditions of any work of art. However Tolia Astali and Dylan Peirce are pathfinders of the break within that fusion. They are pathfinders along the différance as Jacques Derrida put it. Their common body of works investigates, expands and exposes exactly that grade. Because they operate exactly in between the object and the idea, it is so difficult to find words for their works.

A description of the works exposed from various angles may help to provide a verbal fixation. At first glimpse one perceives a somewhat weatheredobject, may it be a grey drapery, a dried skin or a broken film. Seemingly the colour has drawn out of the matter. A second closer look offers an overwhelming richness of detail at the surface. It consists of a meltdown of mostly unrecognizable yet familiar structures, of traces left by fusing or cutting and of the residues of an eroded deserted imagery. This all is embedded in the translucent fragmentation of the surface material. A third deeper inner search brings up associations with blurred images of architectural relicts, fossilizations of satellite photographs or augmented body zones, only to name a few. Just these descriptions may show the various layers of alienation and levels of factitiousness the artists bring into effect. Like a spectre it is all there, but it is not graspable. Again it was up to Derrida to pronounce the Hauntology* of our times. We are haunted by the ghosts of the unfinished utopias we have had at the climax of western modernity.

Astali/Peirce´s works take a step further, they are phantoms of a future after humankind right in front of us, in our present times. They are messengers of dystopia, imprints of the anthropocene. Or they may represent a frequency so deep we cannot hear but sense. Or they might be a slice of the dark matter that invisibly connects all measurable quantities.
In the end these marks incarnate a state of their very own. They radiate their distant temporality, their opaque sources, their insecure materiality and their coded purpose.

Looking now back from the works to the title of this selection, at the latest the arranged crack, the Sollbruchstelle in FAULTLINES becomes evident. This elegantly subverted wordplay is a formal tautology by itself. The incorrect form repeats and completes the significance. The circle is closed and the inner void is created.
                                                                                         Stephan Klee

* Jacques Derrida “Spectres of Marx”, ISBN 2-7186-0429-8, 1993


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Opening Thu 23 Nov 6 - 9 pm
23 Nov - 8 Dez 2017
Thu - Sat 2 - 6 pm

frontviews
Tucholskystraße 37
10117 Berlin

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