Gallery 8

Dina Baitassova, Fredrik Nielsen, Louis-Cyprien Rials & Tahmineh Monzavi

23.11.2022 ­– 19.01.2023

venti, aurae, anima – spirit of fluidity

Lavoisier, while studying the human respiratory cycle, discovers that breathing is, basically, a process of combustion – converting of one substance into another: “…nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

The very act of breathing weaves all living things into inexorable stream of interactions, and just as we share this vast ocean of air with each other, we also exist in an environment, albeit heterogeneous, of images – visually perceptible or symbolic – images that are immanent to our existence within the world: they circulate between our internal sensibilities and external forms. We only truly actualize when interacting with the Other; we spontaneously and inevitably attribute something inner to what is given to sense as outer. This ever-changing relentless flow of metaphoric “air” makes us feel alive.

This exhibition sees its intention in overcoming the inertia of words regarding dark times we live in. We would rather prefer the aesthetic not to become an anaesthetic for reality, when we mesmerized by it turn into callous solipsists. Art and beauty are surely not meant to be entertaining. Beauty is about hope. It has a unique force of restoring the will to live. To be distracted from one’s day-to-day existence by beauty is quite wrong, to find a whole new level of involvement into the world through it – is right.

In the process of trying to write about it clichés were kind of inevitable, but where words are helpless, art reveals its indubitable power and it’s through the artistic ingenious approach that non-trivial revelations bloom.