In the previous post we looked at Chun Kwang Young's works made with paper taken from discarded second-hand books. Japanese pioneering art collective Dumb Type moved instead from an 1850s geography textbook to create the installation "2022" at the Japan Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
Founded in 1984, the interdisciplinary collective Dumb Type is active in a variety of fields, including art, computer programming and music, and creates installations, performances and videos. Their works address a variety of social issues, including gender, race, AIDS, technology and information society.
They are known for an open-ended style with no fixed directors, but a changing roster of members participating in each new production. This year, for example, the collective has added a new member, Japanese composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto.
For the Biennale the collective stripped bare the pavilion and covered with a layer of glass the hole that was opened in the floor for the installation at the 57th Venice Biennale.
The space is bare, but, along the perimeter of the structure, there are a revolving mirror system, laser devices, revolving parametric speakers and loudspeakers. The mirrors rotate at high speed, reflecting lasers that project text onto the surrounding walls.
All the texts, taken from a geography book from the 1800s, pose simple yet universal questions. Field recordings (by Sakamoto) of voices reading the texts are emitted from rotating parametric speakers, so that the space is permeated by laser beams and sounds. The center of the room is instead empty, to symbolise a place that doesn't exist or that could exist anywhere.
Visitors are invited to enter the pavilion and consider the world we live in, a universe made of post-truths and liminal spaces, at times overcrowded, at others extremely solitary and empty.
While the installation may be considered by those art fans who prefer more visually stimulating spaces as too minimal, the idea here is to offer a quiet space where visitors can ponder about how humans communicate with each other (the laser beams and the recorded voices seem to bounce from one wall to the other, continuously reaching out and expanding) and perceive the world, while considering wider key issues such as climate change, the power of the Internet and of social media and the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on our lives.
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