BRAZILIAN CULTURE MONTH

ART EXHIBITION

After Utopia
Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain
Curated by Michael Asbury

Friday 13 October 2006, 20:00
Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art
24 Dem.Severis Ave.
Nicosia

13 October – 15 November 2006
Tuesday - Friday 10am-1pm, 3pm-5pm and by appointment
(Reception: First floor)
                                                                                    

Working within the interstices of fine art and graphic design, in addition to possessing a strong collaborative drive, Detanico & Lain have developed a practice based on the playful displacement of meaning. They do this via the language of the information age, but their wit allows them to avoid the sole reliance on the complexity of technological means. Instead they make use of simple procedures in order to produce powerful visual poetics. In their interweaving of form and content, which strongly relies on language, they evoke the legacy of concrete art. However, their poetic approach owes nothing to nostalgia as it draws on irony and irreverence, while the complexity of issues that it evokes relate undoubtedly to our contemporary world.

The duo will be presenting the works Flatland (2003), Pilha (2003, 2004, 2005), Plaf (2004), The Waves (2005), The World Justified (2004) and Utopia (2001), using video, stills from video, installation, photography and digital files. Utopia, an early work, consists of a typeface design to run within word processing programmes, in which capital letters are replaced by iconic buildings of Brazil’s foremost modernist architect, Oscar Niemeyer, whilst lower-case letters are equated with urban interferences such as fences and skateboarders. Detanico & Lain had already expressed an interest in the translation of image into text with Pilha (2003), where the simplicity of the process obscures the complexity of adapting the system within different contexts of language and culture. In producing this sculptural form of writing, the artists select objects that have a relation to the location. Writing over an existing text, which is a form of code-making, becomes the process behind The Waves. This video in a loop was produced by animating the pages of Virginia Wolf’s novel, which gives the work its title.

Curator Michael Asbury writes on Flatland, winner of the Nam June Paik award (2004): “Flatland is at the origin of the artists’ process of translating still images into film. The video is the product of a series of 8 video stills taken at different moments of the day during a boat trip along the Mekong River Delta. Detanico & Lain dissected each vertical pixel line stretching it so that it would occupy the entire frame. These are then placed into an animated sequence, which not only exaggerates the flatness of the landscape but produces an impression of acceleration. We experience the rise and fall of daylight over the 7 minutes duration of the video and forget the fact that it is actually produced from still images. The sequence is accompanied by a concrete soundtrack that was edited from sounds ‘collected’ from the boat.

The artists’ track record of engagement with local cultures and languages during their still short but highly international career, leads one to expect interesting fruits during their forthcoming first encounter with Nicosia, Cyprus.