‘White Heaven’ is an explanatory, educational group of works. It is a subjective definition with limited validity, or rather speculation. The video illustrates a text of a topic-specific interview.
And what the video talks about is a collection of definitions: a definition of a perfect world, an ideal society – a collection by a white European man, or even, speculations by a white European woman based on the image of a realized paradise. And the views expressed during the interview seem almost perfectly valid even when put into the mouth of different characters in an online reading software.
/There is no room for anything unfinished or imperfect/
1) looped as a metronome; a swinging tied ham,
where the body has been simplified for consumption,
an originally amorphous, passive substance held
by the net, this rope-strength system keeps it against
the force of gravity to avoid the free fall, the death;
2) this existential conflict represented also by
a virtual body, moving alone in an infinite
space in a virtual coordinate system – where
the motions are selected from a collection of
an online database. This digitized motion pattern
can be mapped to any anthropomorphic body,
or more precisely, any anthropomorphic body
can be mapped to these digital data packets;
sometimes representing a feeling, sometimes an act.
With the help of a sensory dress, this dataset creates a skeleton-like frame of a particular gesture or action.
The White Heaven aimed to draw up a visionary, utopistic or even post-apocalyptic scene with a constant dualistic tension. It creates a formal and content-related conflict between the used materials, for example by drawing up a tension between the bright lights of the projection and the pigmented brutalist concrete blocks next to it, or by creating a contradiction using an advertising hologram fan to represent a faux religious, poem-like text. All the represented contradictions target to describe or question the inherited dualistic, western existentialist perspective -- in a sensual and half-automated way.
“Let it be Nothing
The Promising Beginning,
The Law is the Death
Your mind the Chaos!
Chew apart the
Rigid Order
Breathe in it
Your acidic desires!
Swallow the Master!
Swallow the Master!
the Worm is your Soul
the Concrete: your Body!”
detailed comment:
Raw and robotic catatonia, dark tones, ruins, fragmented interview, a hologram, and surrounding disillusion – nearly everywhere. In many ways, the White Heaven appears to be a stereotyping title and it behaves as a counterpoint to the overall image of the exhibition. It represents a non-existing, heterotopic, or even exclusive space where there is no room for anything unfinished or even imperfect. Being attached to this contradiction, the installation – the sculptures and videos together – depict a systematic process of demolition in the exhibition space. This demolition always targets the individual to deconstruct it,
and,
through this disassembly, attempts to interpret the existing social system, the framework, to which the individual always conforms. There are two key elements of the exhibition: the net and the body; and the relationship between the two. So the eternal conflict between the net (or let’s call it the social system, coordinate system, rules, belief, law or prohibition) and the body (the meat, a raw, untreated concrete, human instincts, desires, or stimuli) is manifested in several ways:
Thus, from an individual or unique phenomenon to a symbolic, an originally unique set of human actions downgrades to a standardized, replicable, or replaceable version, like a feeling-asset. It’s not just demolition – it’s rather destruction, but without any negative label. Necessary automation. Cloning – with a little exaggeration. The inbuilt interview is illustrated by an animation that consists of an arbitrary arrangement of the movements mentioned above. The English dub of the video is spelled by text-to-speech avatars with different dialects and genders, so the originally personal, subjective response is reduced to a blank text example without any true identity.
Stringing on the specific topic
Suppose that every time we criticize our own lives, our relationships with the others, or when we want a better life, a better relationship, economy, or prosperity, we are never thinking in an organic, ever-changing, flawed, chaotic, unknowable system. We think in solving formulas, concrete shapes, solutions, or simplified, framed behaviors. In utopias. Suppose that his constant need for simplification, clutter, or regulation controls the already chaotic, impulsive, inconsistent, greedy, selfish, or sometimes even self-defeating human nature. The basic human part, let’s call it even the animal, this instinctive part that can be controlled with the help of consciousness: an internalized control. The concrete, hand-molded meat blocks can be interpreted as mementos of this successful control process, or they can be seen as cooled down monuments of one-person rebellions.
