A careless visitor rambling around Jan Manski's current exhibition at Breese Little's main gallery may think that some of the themes tackled by the artist may be connected with the steampunk aesthetic. Yet there's more behind the vintage look and the man Vs machinery dichotomy in Manski's pieces forming the contents of the "Possesia" event.
Conceived as part of a wider trilogy comprising Manski's projects "Onania" and "Eugenica", "Possesia" is suspended between reality and fiction and explores a series of topics including aesthetics, politics, modern culture, mythology, history and the occult in the Nazi ideology of the Third Reich.
Quite a few of the pieces on display look disturbingly ambiguous: anatomy illustrations are combined with random metal tools that may or may not be stylised instruments of torture; a photograph of Nietzsche dirtied with soil, tar and resin is attached with clamps to an analogue voltmeter; disturbing idols are made with an old prosthetic leg in an army boot or with a mannequin head fused with a ram's horn and smeared with paint, and soil.
Materials have a key role in Manski's pieces: fur, leather, antlers, vintage mannequins, animal bones and steel are all reconfigured into mysterious figures, combined with rusting tools, locked in a cage or displayed in a glass cabinet. Manski's emphasis on physical objects and inhuman figures also criticise consumer culture, hinting at grotesque doubles of the idealised Nazi body.
"Primal Elements", the film that accompanies the event, actually seems to synthesise much better the main themes of the event: 1930s documentary images including shots of German soldiers marching are combined with those of a man controlling a prosthetic arm through a series of muscular contractions, contributing to the suffocating and apocalyptic atmosphere of the exhibition.
Manski is actually not new to such dystopic moods in a way: his first exhibition, "Onania" addressed allure, vanity and hedonism through attractive-repellent images and upsetting installations featuring mannequins altered using fat, leather, bones, fur and cosmetics that pointed towards themes such as hybridisation and mutation.
Though "Possesia" is another multi-disciplinary project similar to "Onania" for Manski's main approach, it is definitely a darker, more aggressive and violently macabre distorted world.
Manski claimed he has been inspired in his series by Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky among the others, but the connections of "Possesia" with history also tap into tangible modern anxieties and fears generated by real historical events.
Inspiring uneasiness in the visitors, "Possesia" may not be for the faint-hearted, and you can bet there will be more unsettling artworks by Manski in "Eugenica", the third part of his trilogy. Scheduled to be presented in 2015, this new event will address human beings' capacity to extinguish themselves through extreme interpretations of the Darwinian selection.
"Jan Manski: Possesia", Breese Little, 30b Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DU, UK, until 12th April 2014
Image credits for this post
Jan Manski, "Idol III"
2010 / 100 x 70 cm (39 3/8 x 27 9/16 in)
colour photograph, soil, steel
Jan Manski, "Idol I"
2013 / 86 x 200 x 86 cm (33 x 78 3/4 x 33 in)
leather, found army boot, prosthetic leg, mannequin parts, bones, found machinery, polyvinyl acetate, soil, fur, horn, vitrine
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