Installation: acrylic, metallic pigment and charcoal on canvas (31x31cm), leaflet holder with leaflets (21.5×11.5cm), MDF pedestal, 2006
Language as an acknowledgement of the failure of human communication is an installation that plays with the formation of identities and with how these are understood depending on the context.
Laaaotfohc is formed of a canvas on the wall, leaflets in a pl`astic leaflet holder on a pedestal, a flyer, a business card and an e-mail address that generates a false error message when contacted, containing the same message as the leaflet, a fragment of a patented agricultural genetic code.
Laaaotfohc is an accumulation of absurdities. A canvas with painting status but without purpose. Advertising that questions instead of persuading. A failed communication attempt. A sold identity.
What is an identity?
Are you an independently thinking individual who just happens to choose to behave like everyone else around you? Or, is your identity manufactured? Does our society require standard individuals just as it requires standard commodities for mass production? If this is the case, how is a standard identity shaped?
My projects on propaganda and manipulation and the question of how we are shaped by the society that we live in, made me ask myself about the origin of our identity. Who is responsible for who we are? Are we shaped despite ourselves to fit in the machinery? And if so, who are we without that indoctrination?
Identity as a subject was quite present in the academic art discourses around 2006. Although predominantly from a subjective and perhaps philosophical point of view. I was more interested in the political aspect of identity. I wanted to discover which discourses dominated postmodernism. Because, like subterranean waters, and regardless of the talk about postmodernism being precisely a lack of great discourses, they were there. And being unacknowledged gave them more power. The short circuit caused by the contradictions that I saw in the practice of postmodernism in the arts world made me feel artistic paranoia and tremendous existential doubt. Because, deep down, I could sense that the dominant sort of postmodern relativism which appeared as philosophical, was in reality a speculative tool at the orders of the neoliberal market.
In the media the subject of identity was present in the fascination of the sequencing of the human genome, which was going to unveil all mysteries.
I made laaaotfohc for Identikit, an exhibition on identity by 15 artists in February 2006 in London. I also did the graphic design work for the exhibition.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.