Reviews: MOMENTA (Part III): Annette Rose, Bianca Baldi, Maya Watanabe, Shaheer Zazai, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Morgan Legaré

If the previous article on MOMENTA addressed the problem of the use of imagery to construct a narrative and the ways in which the image as art undermined its reterritorialization as “culture,” this article looks at this in a more basic way through how a series of exhibitions highlight a much more foundational aspect of the image. This is done both technically and thematically.

One of the more blatant means by which this is introduced is a stress on the pixel as a kind of “building block” for the digital image. As a term, pixel comes from popular cinematic discourse (“pix” as plural for motion pictures) that was wedded to “el” (element). As one of the smallest elements of a digital image (raster or dot matrix), it contains a sample of an image (whether indexical or strictly synthetic). In printing or digital imaging, their appearance varies greatly according to resolution and to how they have been gridded. They can be rendered as squares, dots, lines, etc.

The stress on the pixel as a block or the elemental comes up in several shows in which it is explicitly rendered as a way of thematizing what statement the image is being used to make. It takes on a kind of cosmic quality as a vibrant material that is being put in play. 

Although not part of MOMENTA, the show at Elektra that sits across the hall from Centre Clark and Diagonale and next to Dazibao might as well have been. Morgan Legaré’s Salle blanche/Clean Room presents what resembles an office cubicle. It stresses the sleek minimalist design of the space and its industrial products. It suggests a design studio, displaying several large prints of images of designed spaces, blown up and distorted by pixelation. All of these prints are sitting on the floor while the “wallspace” of the cubicle is explicitly blank.

The artist takes a sensitive look at the minimalist aesthetics of these industrial materials, reusing and sublimating the utilitarian codes of production line machinery. In this way, the imposing, delicate framework of extruded aluminum and acrylic appears as a case in which the 3D modeling tool operates its protocol to generate an installation and artistic corpus in real time.

Aside from this generative aspect, the one that dominates is the weight of the pixel. The mode of display, and the spindly way in which the skeletal frame encompasses so much of the space, adds to the sense in which the images seem weighted down.

This baseline of the visual object, one which represents its own fundamental unit for representation and foregrounds the extent to which that is a process, becomes basic to a narrative of metamorphoses in Optica’s MOMENTA installation. Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’ The Pond

examines the ambivalent relationships between humans and the natural world within the context of ecological destruction. As she builds virtual realms populated with hybrid beings inspired by real flora and fauna, including those from the tropical forest of her native Costa Rica, her 3D animation works simulate an opulent natural environment that evolves in parallel to humanity. Technology itself is likened to an organism composed of multiple layers of superimposed and interlinked images, offering possible ways to reconnect with our devastated environment.

In practice, what you encounter is a shiny aqua world, one part SpongeBob filtered through early 90s Jan Hammer videos, and the other biomorphic abstractions that tend to suggest breasts hybridized with Christmas tree bulbs. It is all set to vaguely vaporwave sounds and a voice trilling about pixels washing over her and providing a narrative of sorts, although how its dots are connected shifts significantly depending on when you walk in and out of the exhibition. 

One wall is covered in a projection of this simulated underwater space. Heading toward it, you pass by a screen which captures your movements, superimposing various simulated creatures around you. While this is all familiar to anyone who has used photo apps or had the misfortune of going on TikTok, these effects are less interesting than the way that they have been theatricalized.

This gesture denies the image much of a power of virtualization or immersiveness. What confronts the viewer more is the mechanics than the illusion. While technology is clearly portrayed as an organism and plays its part in the transformative values of an increasingly pixelated world, it is also presented in a distinctly clunky way, like one of those children’s mobiles that project brightly coloured figures. In fact, the smaller installation in the corner of the space is suggestive of this sort of toy imagery. As with Legaré’s exhibition, both the mechanics of the production of the image and the traces of that production in the image are the guiding thematic. 

 

At Dazibao, this is given a slightly different nuance. Annette Rose’s Enzyklopädie der Handhabungen: Braiding Gazes consists of three video works, each running two videos simultaneously. They are abstracted from a much larger series of “modules,” each concentrating on a different set of (primarily) mechanical gestures. One (Nest Building) is primarily a medium-long shot of birds in a cage with people passing by occasionally. One is a slowed close-up of a typing machine (Captured Motion), and one is a textile machine (Pattern in Motion). All of these are doubled at a different angle that stresses the artificial construction of the other. The last of these is shot to stress its graphic and design aspect and functions quite well as a kind of animated pattern in constant flux, its mechanical soundtrack giving the whole thing a droning whir. Against this wall of noise with its micro-fluctuation are the tweets and songs of the birds, the two soundtracks blurring together.

Rose both shifts our anthropocentric perspective and exposes a theatrical device for controlling living beings. The synchronous dance of threads, fibres, and grasses in the modules draws a transverse arc from the most highly advanced human-made technology to the immemorial techniques of birds building their nests. Rose, in turn, sculpts the gallery space by weaving her work into it.

The gallery statement here rather deftly shows just how unsettled these categories are. The living, the technological, and the animal blur together, the second sentence casting considerable dubiousness on the retention of the categories of the human and living. The perceptual system of the viewer functions as just another fabric to be acted on through the theatricalization that the installation effects.

If Rose’s work denudes the theatre of categorical perception and undermines the dichotomy of nature and culture, the exhibition of textile works at Patel|Brown seems framed and curated to overcompensate lest such a point becomes too clear. 

Shaheer Zazai’s Allow me to Sow and See the Garden I Become is framed as exploring “how culture and identity are constructed” by reflecting on how Afghanistan (his country of origin) is perceived. Making a show of avoiding the spectre of war, he concentrates on textile patterns and flower arrangements. The gallery even contains floral arrangements by Atelier Bochatay that respond to his work. All in all, we are assured that “Zazai delved further into the therapeutic powers of nature and its ineluctable link to resilience and survival.”

The exhibition involves a range of vibrantly coloured carpets and digital prints of striking patterns. Taking inspiration from Afghan tradition, he uses “the diagrams he draws in his Word document, textile works are then produced on a Jacquard loom, marking the long-standing relationship between computer language and the binary codes behind all weaving patterns.” Many of the results tend to have a distinct video game graphic aesthetic to them with their gradient of hues and iconic treatment flora.

In its mechanical and repetitive qualities as well as its colour schemes, it merges with the hypnagogic pop sensibilities of so much of the other work discussed. However, it seems far less about the “therapeutic powers of nature” than a mixture of nostalgia for things that are only known as media. Indeed, one could make a case that the presentation of flower arrangements is in line with this sense of necessary denaturalization (it has been explicitly killed and abstracted), and the “resilience and survival” reads much more as a positive, albeit perverse, affirmation of this.

If Legaré’s exhibition affirmed an almost inhuman world without ornamentation where its micro-world effectively functioned as an icon that generated its own variants, what Zazai seems to perform is a curiously anxiety-filled complement to this. A (very vague) historical connotation was grafted onto this by appealing to his “identity” and something similar, if more ambiguous, is at play in the show at Diagonale.

Bianca Baldi’s video installation Play-White

presents as a loose adaptation of African-American writer Nella Larsen’s novel Passing. In South Africa, “play white” is a common term for Black or biracial people who, as a ruse, pass themselves off as white. Baldi’s appropriation of this racist term engages in a hybrid reflection on the unstable nature of identity. The video juxtaposes images that were filmed at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille with a polyphonic story narrated in a voice-over portraying three “white” voices, who are sometimes interrupted by the powerful singing voice of a Whitney Houston impersonator singing excerpts of the song I Have Nothing. On screen, the behavior of a cuttlefish temporarily removed from its natural environment alters its own pigmentation in response to quotes taken from the novel.

The video itself concentrates on the recurrent appearance of the eye of the fish, the image otherwise clouded by pixelated close-ups of the scales and tub that render its interpretation difficult. There is a strong optical play between this recurrence of the black dot and the overall domination of a scale of white tones. The startling variance between this use of micro-differentiation and its interruption is set beside the audio texture. 

Made of one humdrum voice reading all of the characters and narration of a dialogue in the same tone like the Russian overdubbing on a bootleg video, this drone is accompanied by an ironically sentimentalizing soundscape that veers between vaporwave and generic soap opera organ as it unwraps the “relations” between its barely distinguishable characters. Like some of the other exhibitions, it relies on a juxtaposition between low-resolution figuration and distorted but over-defined sound.

Surrounding the video’s projection are a series of banners that seem to parody fish scales and traditional African design motifs. You would not glean anything of its description from simply watching the work. The logic of the video itself completely ungrounds the references on which the identity narrative is staked. It further complicates it by naturalizing the implied melodrama, again collapsing the credibility of the socio-cultural divide and of any specifically human agency. As such, it is not really dealing with impersonation so much as the apersonalism of a set of intersecting textures.

To the extent that it retains the sentimentalizing implications of its “narrative,” it is as a “ruse” to make the collapse into ambient space of the videoworld that much more evident, dramatized through the continual crunch of the image into its basic blocks that appear like rippling waves. 

Running 64 minutes, Maya Watanabe’s Liminal showing at Occurrence moves at slower than a snail’s pace, often stopping for extended periods to concentrate on bits of dirt, debris, insects, and less clear materials. Overwhelming most of this is the highly amplified sounds of the insect and animal life around these small patches of the world. Describing this as “visually seductive” (someone else could have called it “tortuously tedious”), the gallery goes on to claim that

what [the images] “reveal” is not only the volatile nature of all perception, but also the silent proof of history engraved on the physical world. The artist investigates the painful history of Peru, her native country, which is still shaken by its longstanding political turmoil. In Ayacucho and Huánuco, on two sites that bear witness to the massacres perpetrated there in 1984 that particularly affected the Quechua communities, Watanabe recorded what lies before her own eyes.

The rationale for the work that the artist provides on her website is substantially more helpful:

…19 years after the official end of the conflict, 16.000 missing people and 6.000 unexhumated mass graves are still waiting to be grieved. [p] Generally speaking, current exhumations and postmortem efforts to identify buried victims in mass graves strive to ‘restitute’ their personhood, to determine the legal death and to confer the family the possibility for grieving. In the Peruvian case where the corpses are reduced to bones, it is both the forensic archaeologist and the forensic anthropologist who ‘restore’ the victim’s identity. During the fieldwork, the forensic archaeologist exhumates and recovers the human remains, which are later taken to the forensic anthropologist for the laboratory analysis and the definitive identification. In between those two interventions, the remains hover in a suspended transitional legal status between “missing person” and the official declaration of its death. [p] Liminal takes place during that transitional state and responds to the subjects that are in a limbo of legal recognition, on the threshold of the subjecthood, the recognisable and the representable.

In genre terms, it is a kind of horror movie. The framing for the video constructs its own haunting. The “missing person” is presented as the missing in a way so literal it borders on the paradoxically hilarious. Representing the unrepresentable raises far fewer questions about representation and its limits than it does about what they supposedly absent. It points to what may be a basic conflict between primarily discursive legal fictions (persons, victims, etc.) and a visuality within which these things do not clearly exist. Indeed the work rhetorically removes them, even to the extent of showing how the “silent proof of history” alluded to in the gallery framing is the cacophony of a nature for which these discursive fictions are only noise. 

The artwork then is not really liminal. It is not some in-between state on a path to becoming something or other, it already radically is that something or other whose evidence puts the legal fiction in question. Rather than the dynamism of the liminal, what is created is the surface that seals off exhumation, rendering it as a ghostly illusion.

Fantasies of haunting take on a rather different form over at Centre Clark. In Cosmic microwave background, Timothy Yanick Hunter presents several series: a doubled video, a stacked tripled video, and a grid of photos. The latter of these is pixelated in full impressionist colours ratcheted up, its figures doubled and multiplied, cut and pasted to the landscape. The videos dissect, multiply, slice and juxtapose their imagery, which is primarily taken from the banalities of the marketplace, etc. All of this is sped up with distorted vocals and ambient music.

Cosmic microwave background (CMBR) is understood as microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. This collection of works refers to the cosmic microwave background by ways of endless repetition, expansion and reverberating possibilities. In its essence, the work aims to describe the unseen and unknown — in other ways, it the work captures arrayed possibilities, ephemeralities and alternatives. Through this, I'm trying to convey complex ways of being —- divergent states of intimacy, life, displacement and loss. Parallel to this is the fragmentation of history, specifically Black diasporic history, which is something that cannot be measured by dominant methods of study and observation. [p] Microwave Background is a view of history from a cosmic, ethereal vantage point; sampling moments and weaving them together. This work is the embrace of non-linearity, opacity, the unknown and ultimately the blackness of space and time. .

Although there is clearly an attempt in this framing to anchor the work in a socially meaningful and recognizable conceptualization of historical experience, this jars pretty aggressively with the cosmology that it invokes and evocatively depicts, and which makes the historical subjects he dissects and multiplies like garnishes appear as just another set of elements. Presented as base elements, their “divergent states” are only presented as transient illusions.