Art Rotterdam 2020
06.02.2020 - 09.02.2020
Simultaneous Truths
Structura Gallery presents Natalia Jordanova at one of the most energetic international forums, whose motto is “The Fair to Discover Young Art”. The specially created project is part of the New Art Section, curated for the second year by Brazilian curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto. The great recognition of the artist and the supporting gallery is the nomination for the prestige NN Art Award for talented artists who have completed their education in the Netherlands and demonstrate authentic and innovative approach.Together with the other three nominated artists, Natalia Jordanova will have a special presentation at the fair. The award will be announced at the official opening on February 5th.
At stand N8 Structura Gallery and the artist will present Simultaneous Truths – a sculptural installation, developed as a constructed ecosystem of images and signs. It consists of eight objects resembling fortune teller orbs, spread in the space. The surface of the glass is hosting 3D printed models of a creature, familiar from Ridley Scot’s Alien movie. On the walls, there are two-dimensional sculptural pieces, made by transferring hand drawings and cut by machine. These are called The Crack and each one has an assigned number. They designate the walls as the border of the space, being physical space themselves. The artist is using hands, machines and software to construct a narrative exploring myths, science fiction imagination and the desire to know. If a poet is someone with a tuned ear, then the viewer is a narrator of the story he sees.
Natalia Jordanova is looking closely at her own experiences, translating ideas related to post-human body and our changing relation with technology through mediation. Working with installation allows her to incorporate sculpture, video, sound, text and drawing. She sees that as a form of building a subjective ecosystem where hierarchy between materials and mediums collide, puts them in question, and produces meaning by putting the human out of the centre. For her, the primary importance of installation is the idea of presence of the viewer. In her own view, it is the closest possibility to world-building.
Until now the leading scale and reference point for the artist was the human body, now this correlation is missing. Now the body is substituted with the information needed for it to be artificially produced. The body is made, but not born. The work is set in a narrative where the desire to know suggests different ideas of truth. The fortune-teller orbs forms a constellation of possible readings. Jordanova proposes that there is no single subject, no single narrative, no single truth. With this body of work, she takes a step and expand on her research on what is to be human today with an account on technological development, communication protocols and intimacy. She is now digging through mythological representations of artificial life, literary sources and speculations to construct a non-linear genealogy of the artificial life.
What traces do we leave behind under the circumstances of collective anxiety, which is induced by the shared belief in a threat of the uncertain future?
This has been the underlying question for Natalia Jordanova when exploring ideas of mediated body within her practice. Global and earthly pressure, which we tend to experience through filtered truths, and its image mediation is scaled down to provide intimacy through presence.
For the NN Art Award, the artist will show the predecessor of that work. It is an installation called Museum of Non-Human Ethics, where a starting point were legal cases in which human is trying to sue a robot for an accident it caused. It is placing the viewer in a narrative from the near future where ideas of ethic are assigned to non-human, human-made entities.
It is problematic to understand the idea of claiming responsibility of non-human entities since we don’t assign consciousness to those. Even not being fully described and explained, consciousness has been never assigned to animals either. This anthropocentric belief hence becomes the premise of considering rights and ethics intrinsic only to human. The question remains – how we understand those principles in a time of accelerated change and redefinition of what it means to be human today?
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