Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale - Dénes Farkas - Evident in Advance

The exhibition EVIDENT IN ADVANCE develops a vast diapason of issues, grouped around the elusiveness of language, the (im)possibilities of translation and the logic of infinite re-translations. Its concept is playfully inspired by an adventurous storyline of American writer, Bruce Duffy’s ground-breaking novel, „The World As I Found It“ (1987), a melange of fiction and reality, truth and fake, where history, biography and philosophy are intertwined in a witty narrating of lifes of three philosphers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore.

Here, on the pages of this fascinating book, contemplation, free thinking and magnetic philosophy construct an architecture of thought, precise and logic, but unstable too, challenged by a polymorphousness of sense and meaning.

The exhibition in Estonian Pavilion is orchestrated as a composition based upon a slightly varying sets of a (as if musical) score: the articulations of the same story created from the carefully deconstructed novel and from other related sources (the texts of the above mentioned philosophers, texts of the authors and co-authors of the project) are spatialized within a give physical space and a mental space of the viewer’s perceptive field. Here, we are at the threshold of a meaning’s construction as an on-going study of a repetition and silence.

The very act of working with the original text – taking apart, dismantling, editing and appropriating – is conducted under a supervision and a control of the author of the novel himself – a mastermind – and assisted by a linguist, an expert of sorts, a passionate of words, letters, and their troublesome relationships and by a scholar, an expert in echoes and resonances, shadow-meanings and their secret influence.

The rigid interior architecture of Estonian Pavilion with a vast entrance-hallway and adjacent living-rooms writes a potential scenario of a master-narrative and chapter-like episodes. The rooms are chamber-minds – rough references to situations, positions and spaces that surround a more complex, almost questionably standard-like exhibition space. A close collaboration with an architect should help to deal with such a complex construction site by turning it into a realm of criticality where language is perceived as a mathematical issue in a truly Wittgensteinian way.

The exhibition’s concept relies upon elements that come from various fields of culture and knowledge production. A variety of direct references in a spatial concept of related rooms but also the articulation of the main thought are fueled by the ideas of collections, archives, museums, libraries, but also of dictionaries, indices and cataloging. They deal with the systems of order and classification and correspond with the usage of and relationality between public and private spaces. How do we understand the same word or sentence in dissimilar surroundings? How do we communicate in different situations? How do we write space? How can we achieve a real communication with a medium of an exhibition?

Challenged by Bruce Duffy’s act of a narrative forgery, the exhibition explores a doubt and suspension of belief by a further reconsideration of the thoughts of the author’s protagonists in a reasonably critical way. Breaking up the imaginary story and creating a whole new dizzy polylogue produces an intriguing but also heavily coded play. The narrative is not eventual – the visitor, drawn in a textual net, is supposed to become a part of a unique story. Various fragments of the main text and elements of a stage paired in different forms, mostly not visibly at first sight, contribute to a new geometry of a site, both physical and mental. A relatively silent play on a very simple and restrained stage – an artificial setting, very likely just a model, existing only as reproductions on photographs, puzzles of a generic cartography. Here, we are in a realm of palimpsest, overlap of texts, an ivory towers of memory, history and contemporary desire to replay the times past.

However EVIDENT IN ADVANCE rejects a hyper-narrative which would emphasize the fabricated mastery and perfection of a human mind. Instead, it focuses on errors and logical mistakes, moments of weakness and inability. From the very beginning, being haunted by its predictability, the narrative is condemned to a delicious failure and collapse. Aware of such a fate, the project in a Beckettian way exercises its own inabilities in an ritualistic act of repetition and seriality.

Here, there is a maze of almost identical rooms, acting like words in a lost sentence before its articulation. What are we saying? Why are we saying (it)? The content and its pronounciation are seemingly blurred. How do we understand (it)? How are we trying to put bits of information together in order to construct a useful and meaningful story? The process of production and the act of reception concentrate on such questions. The despair conducts the deconstruction of a text and the assemblage of installations. Using the same words and the same sentences and even the same logical constructions, we are still in a danger of manouvering through misled areas of meaning and common sense.

Proustian paraphrase „a la recherche de la recit perdu“ (mis)guids the authors of this project. In order to receive instructions how to navigate in the exhibition’s real and imaginary space, it is necessary to open and study the specially created books, while walking around and examining the potential connections between images, objects and words, sentences and episodes. It is not the authors’ intention to create a well recognizable exhibition-like setting as a whole. Eventually the aim is to generate a bit dysfunctional interactive installation within such familiar although uncanny spaces.

Playing with the fragments and resetting the acknowledged codes of a play but also desperately trying to decipher the borders – the end and the beginning – and, last but not least, the center, a guarantee of the meaning of the story; a story which might not beconstructable; or the one which does not exist at all; a phantasmagoria.

Dénes Farkas
Evident in Advance

June 1–November 24, 2013
Palazzo Malipiero
San Samuele Square, S. Marco 3199

Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia is proud to announce that artist Dénes Farkas will represent Estonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia with his project Evident in Advance, curated by Adam Budak.

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