November 2013
Art Hopper Reviews The Unicorn
20/11/13
Oscillating Memories: The Unicorn @ The Transformer Station
arthopper.org
November 20, 2013 by Rose Bouthillier
The Unicorn. 2013. Curated by Reto Thüring. Installation view. The Transformer Station Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art.
The past constantly fades. Attempts to fix it in any way result in something else entirely, a skewed construct influenced by the languages, values and desires of the present.
The Unicorn, curated by Reto Thüring, takes as its premise “the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of producing the past,” and features an international selection of artists: Neïl Beloufa, Martin Soto Climent, Shana Lutkner and a collaborative work by Daniel Gustav Cramer & Haris Epaminonda. The exhibition’s title is inspired by German writer Martin Walser’s novel Das Einhorn (The Unicorn, 1966), in which the protagonist, tasked with writing a novel about love, turns to his own personal history, only to realize that his experiences cannot be accurately recollected or repeated. “Our memory is a scale for losses only. A stock exchange daily accumulating losses,” he writes. The unicorn, as a mythic creature, also represents the seepage of fiction into reality, something constantly searched for but never found. While notes of nostalgia and failure permeate the exhibition, there is also a great deal of play, theatrics and discovery; loss invites new propositions. Read More...
arthopper.org
November 20, 2013 by Rose Bouthillier
The Unicorn. 2013. Curated by Reto Thüring. Installation view. The Transformer Station Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art.
The past constantly fades. Attempts to fix it in any way result in something else entirely, a skewed construct influenced by the languages, values and desires of the present.
The Unicorn, curated by Reto Thüring, takes as its premise “the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of producing the past,” and features an international selection of artists: Neïl Beloufa, Martin Soto Climent, Shana Lutkner and a collaborative work by Daniel Gustav Cramer & Haris Epaminonda. The exhibition’s title is inspired by German writer Martin Walser’s novel Das Einhorn (The Unicorn, 1966), in which the protagonist, tasked with writing a novel about love, turns to his own personal history, only to realize that his experiences cannot be accurately recollected or repeated. “Our memory is a scale for losses only. A stock exchange daily accumulating losses,” he writes. The unicorn, as a mythic creature, also represents the seepage of fiction into reality, something constantly searched for but never found. While notes of nostalgia and failure permeate the exhibition, there is also a great deal of play, theatrics and discovery; loss invites new propositions. Read More...