"Post-Gogol: The Silent Absence of the Body" Exhibition
Slag
This event has ended.
Gogol, not Google’… and we laughed. This exhibition appropriates the name of the great Russian/Ukrainian writer to speak about the haunting appearance of physical objects and images in the present world, in which laughter (sometimes through tears) continues to serve as a potent agent of timeless sublime. Laughter keeps disarming the body and makes it invisible.
The time and the place of action should be considered irrelevant. ‘[I] t is as useless to look in Dead Souls’, as another giant Russian writer observed, ‘for an authentic Russian background as it would be to try and form a conception of Denmark on the basis of that little affair in cloudy Elsinore.’ Who doubts the existence of Dead Souls …
Post-Gogol: The Silent Absence of the Body is a micro-tribute to books, or rather to the book, not as a text, a pure artifact or a found object, but rather as an inspiration (direct or indirect) for the artist. By alluding to such loaded referents as Gogol’s stories, the artist acknowledges the rigorous yet evanescent power of poesis. However, none of the artists in this show illustrates Gogol; what they do, instead, they share ‘a Gogolian gusto of weird details.’
Media
Schedule
from February 18, 2010 to March 16, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-02-18 from 18:00 to 20:00