PARASITE & MIMICRY – Opening of the Exhibition at CAC, 5th of December, 6 p.m.

Published on Monday, 01 December 2014 09:34

Ju hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel, Vitamin B - Diagram, 2014

The exhibition Parasite & Mimicry is a result of a one month intensive group work of the artists: Timos Alexandropoulos (GR), KVM (Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel, KR/FR), Christophe Wirth (DE), Irina Gheorghe (RO) at Nida Art Colony.

The overlapping between inside and outside manifests itself in the paradox of the trapped wolf in the second of Munchausen's fantastic stories. The wolf jumps to catch the horse which was pulling the sledge and starts eating his prey, but in so doing ends up finding himself inside the horse, trapped in his harness. The baron was the one promoting the situation by making himself invisible, by literally embracing the sledge and hiding from the danger of the raging wolf until he is able to conduct him instead of the horse. The baron is a figure of the mètis, making use of the situation in order to avoid any kind of binary opposition stuck between antagonistic power dynamics. Mètis is a type of intelligence and of thought “which is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous" (Detienne & Vernant).

The act of navigation within such a world is an invisible and unexpected blow: like parasites do in the micro level of natural conditions. A mimetic strategy of persisting within the given is a trap to manipulate the structures and contexts so that old dichotomies collapse in the environment where power is at work. It functions as an intuitive tactic to exist-resist on the intersection between inside and outside, acknowledging that there is no outside of power. 

Parasite & Mimicry tries to outline a discursive, performative and aesthetic topography which provokes oblique and problematic entanglements. Timos Alexandropoulos’ sound installation is a sonic materialization of the first illegal prime number coexisting in contradictory zones, the one of legality and of illegality. Ju hyun Lee and Ludovic Burel’s minimalized karaoke deploys the typographic impact of lyrics in the mechanical device and the “aesthetic of administration” as a conceptual intersection between Western and Asian culture. Christophe Wirth’s experimental project uses applause in the theater context to subtract narration and play from the conventional mechanism of spectacle. Irina Gheorghe’s performance-video uses non-verbal gestures which have lost signification and power to act to investigate the weird superpositions between the exact sciences and the occult. 

Intersection two-channel synthetic sound
by Timos Alexandropoulos

Intersection is the sonic materialization of the first illegal prime number. The 1811-digit prime number’s binary representation, found by Phil Carmody, corresponds to an illegal source code (DeCSS hacking case) but at the same time is a prime large enough to be archived. Thus it exists in two contradictory zones, the one of legality and the one of illegality. The sonification of the first illegal prime number acts as a mediation for a sensory exploration of this paradox of our digital age, and of the employment of mètis - a wily intelligence - by the number’s finder in order to manipulate a binary situation. By utilizing sound as a tool of decoding different frameworks, conditions and relations, the installation examines the conceptual intersection of two sets that should not have any common element.

Nov Power / Vitamin B
by KVM (Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel)

For the exhibition Parasite and Mimicry, the KVM (Korean Vocal Museum) presents a video and sound installation of two songs extracted from the performative project Pop & Political Korean Karaoke — To Sing Foucault. Nov Power, from the original Psychic TV's song Ov Power (1982), uses minimal and repetitive lyrics on « biopower », Michel Foucault's concept on post-disciplinary control. KVM's karaoke device focuses on the typographic impact of the screen along with the post-punk melody customized by KVM. Vitamin B veers from the original German krautrock group CAN's Vitamin C (1972) and explores more on the bio-issue through the capitalist food industry, lighting on the mechanization of animals and their related pathologies. The absence of the singer's voice and physical action during the exhibition requires a kind of mental participation to the audience captured in the mechanical "dispositif " of an abstract pop and political karaoke apparatus.

Reframing applause 
by Christoph Wirth

3 Videoloops of the performative research from the project !APPLAUDE(!) 

!APPLAUDE(!) implements figurations of applauding into the silence of the theatre space. Given is: a show which consists of its proper frame, the material of applauding. Stage and auditorium exist in a state of suspense, in which the dynamics and potentials of both, their relations and disruptions become "experiencable", their tensions concrete and performative. ! APPLAUDE (!) seeks to examine the automatized mechanisms and dynamics at work in the the process of socio-cultural sense production and validation. The work aims to make these processes conscious again and therefore available for an alternate use. Is there a perspective under which the re – appropriation of over- encoded and consolidated social spaces, practices and performances is thinkable? The video loop – documentation transfers this problem to the gallery space, questioning the status of the art object, while at the same time raising the immaterial gesture of validation, affirmation and appreciation to the rank of an artifact.

The Attack of the Lateral
by Irina Gheorghe

In trying to answer core questions on the nature of reality, philosophical investigation shares a common ground with the natural sciences, but starts to sound like a B-series sci-fi. What is (out) there? What is it like? are starting points of an outlandish trip in which philosophers, scientists and speculative writers try to engage with a world beyond sensory perception. They are trying to smuggle the invisible and find a form of mediation for a real which is utterly alien. Mystical self-erasure brings together the realist philosopher, the scientist as a 'modest witness' and the practitioner of the occult, all trying to channel 'the beyond' through their imperceptible presence. At the other end of this xeno-race lies the interventionist idea of knowledge, the active endeavor of tampering with the environment of the magician-technologist, with a whole toolbox of manipulating devices at hand. Between the two approaches, the film is an attempt to enact the possible gestures of a UFO metaphysics in the desolate landscape of the Curonian Spit in Nida, Lithuania.

Irina Gheorghe, Ju Hyun Lee, Ludovic Burel, Timos Alexandropoulos, Christophe Wirth

Timos Alexandropoulos is a sound artist and a programmer based in Athens / Greece. Highly inspired by the field of contemporary computer music, his work focuses on algorithmic complexity, deconstruction of dance music aesthetics and non-musical disciplines such as data elaboration, tactical media and conceptual aspects of coding. He has founded the non-profit organization Romvos, a platform for the promotion of contemporary creative production in experimental and exploratory music, and the NullPointerConstant, a studio for new media research. He has releases in both foreign and local labels and he has participated in different exhibitions and festivals, such as the  Home/S exhibition ( Goethe/ Benaki museum), Soundout! festival (Berlin/ first prize award), 4th Athens Biennale, etc. 

Christoph Wirth is performing artist, dramaturge and musician based in Berlin. As a dramaturge he worked for Laurent Chétouane and Réne Pollesch amongst others as well as for Central theater, Leipzig from 2008- 2012. He gave guest lectureshipsas a dramaturge at Max-Reinhardt-Seminar (Wien), at TEAK-Actorschool(FIN) and  has been invited to several occasions as a lecturer and workshop leader in “Real Action- Festival” Malmö 2008, Lund University 2011, IETM spring meeting 2011, New Communities Festival Aalborg 2014. His performative works and music works for theatre have been shown at Lofft Leipzig(DE), Schlosstheater Schönbrunn(AU), the Festsival d´Actoral in Maseille(FR), Sophiensäale Berlin(DE), Ballhaus Ost Berlin(DE), Südpol Luzern (SE), INKONST Malmö, Teater Nordkraft(AalborgIn amongst others. In his latest performative works he focuses on the framework of the performance - event itself, examining the very contextual and socio- political conditions which produce it. His works try to short- circuit different artistic  strategies moving between conceptual and body- based approaches, applying sound – and installation art to performative practice.

KVM (Ju hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel) is a French based art research platform founded in 2012 by Korean artist Ju hyun Lee and French publisher and artist Ludovic Burel. Korean Vocal Museum is interested in the production of a discursive “counter-design”. Indeed, KVM aims to elaborate a social criticism of design, conceived in its common sense, as a low or-and high, functional or-and ornamental, cultural and even managerial practice, to which we like to expand it to the problematic of “self design” (“technologies of the self”), as defined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the 80's, as a way to escape from “normativity” and regularity producing something new, in excess, indeterminate, historically open. KVM has presented or performed at the Centre d'art plastique de Saint-Fons (FR), Raven Row Gallery (EN), Fondation d'entreprise Ricard (FR), Palais de Tokyo (FR) and gave workshops and conferences at the Biennale de Design de Saint-Etienne (FR), ARTEM-Nancy (FR), the University of Franche-comté (FR), Kaywon Art University (KR). KVM is supported by the French Institute (Hors les Murs, 2013), the Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques (FNAGP) and the Fonds d'innovation artistique et culturelle en Rhône-Alpes (FIACRE) (2014). 

Irina Gheorghe is an artist from Bucharest who is part of several collectives. Lately she has been exploring topics such as vagueness, secrecy and dissimulation through writing and performance. Under the temporary framework "Rigorously Fuzzy" she is currently investigating the overspillings of exact sciences into the occult, starting from a research into local archives from Romania on the electrical dreams of the previous century. She co-founded The Bureau of Melodramatic Research in 2009 with Alina Popa, as part of which they explore the affective modulations of politics and the emotional performance of labour in the current economy. Recently, BMR has developed an interest in the intricate workings of alien, anonymous passions which connect us to an unhuman world at the core of ourselves. She also co-founded the Bezna group in 2011 (bezna=pitch darkness in Romanian), an obscure congregation which explores the dark sides of knowledge and political action.

The exhibition will be open untill the 21st of December, 2014

Organiser – Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts Nida Art Colony
Partner of the exhibition – Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
Financial Support – Lithuanian Council of Culture