ARTISTS:
Maja Bajević, Igor Grubić, Aydan Murtezaoglu, Adrian Paci
CURATORS:
WHW
Apexart, New York
12/11 – 20/12/2003
WHW curator talk
15/11/2003, 6:30 pm
Looking Awry* presents works that are invested in the potential of repetition, re-actualization, re-staging and re-enactment of certain ordeals, which in order to be comprehended or resolved, need a new, “awry” look, or a look “with sober eyes” as Marx called it.
These works embody and materialize excessive disturbances which desire brings into objective reality and in that sense they are not realistic, but point to the Real, which cannot be symbolized. In the artists’ analysis, the point is not to deconstruct the fascinating presence of images, but to recognize the unbearable presence of the Real, revealed when we “look awry” at the picture. In that sense the title of the exhibition functions also as the key to read the works and as an instruction for the viewer.
*The title has been taken from the book by Slavoj Zizek in which he analyzes cinema from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Looking Awry – An introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture [October, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1992].
