(dys)function
4 September – 14 November 2004
Lund Konsthall
Martenstorget 3,
SE-220 02 Lund
Phone: +46 46 355295
Fax: +46 46 184521
lundskonsthall [at] lund.se
Seeing and observing is certainly something that is implicit in the whole experience of art. The exhibition (dys)function addresses itself to an audience that is prepared to see and at the same time dares to question its seeing. This is not to say that the exhibition deals with the idea of a pure phenomenology. For an exhibition that stresses the visual there are surprisingly many features that work with far more underlying elements than the purely perceptual; (dys)function deals with questions surrounding our process of perception, how we identify our surroundings, and how communication can function non-linguistically in the sense of non-verbally, non-text based, and instead grow out of something that the viewer can recognize and identify as an image. (dys)function indicates that a visual strategy is an artistic language that spreads and ramifies, that does not preclude further readings, that is able to create unexpected angles of approach which in turn force the viewer to take up a new position in the observation of the surrounding world.
(dys)function brings out visual aspects of the activity of artists at a time when these qualities are often subordinated to an underlying narrative. The works in the exhibition do not lack narrative qualities, they only give the impression of taking a rest – or possibly of having got stuck for a while. Here a different system of order is developed, one that relies on repetition and on a reduplicative structure. Looped sequences process the mechanics and functionality of objects and instruments taken from our immediate vicinity and everyday environment, creating their own logic, poetry, or development of events. Well known objects are given close scrutiny, manipulated and given a new character – alien, but at the same time completely recognizable. But not only objects are put to the test; more physically familiar background phenomena are reconsidered, for example shifts in the shells inside and outside the distinctive architecture of the exhibition space – Lunds konsthall. Language too has to dodge the occasional clever sliding tackle.
(dys)function as an exhibition title renounces the ambition of functioning as a list of contents or an exhaustive description of the respective artistic activities of the participating artists. Instead it indicates a duality that emerges in the encounter with the artworks of the exhibition: an intended function and an intended dysfunction that can arise in the free play between the idea of the artwork and the reading of the artwork. Works of art by Attila Csorgo, Ceal Floyer, Alexander Gutke and Rivane Neuenschwander are brimful of visual intelligence where one can find a dialectical tension between the literal and the unspoken, between the concrete and the abstract, between reality and vision, between reality and dream.