Julieta Aranda
“There has been
a miscalculation”
25 April – 20 May 2007
Opening 25 April
5 pm – midnight
Curated by Sofia Curman
and Paola Zamora
Ersta Konsthall
http://www.erstakonsthall.se/18.pdf
The installation “There has been a miscalculation” is part of an ongoing investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and reality. Relying on the viewer’s processes of association, this work aims to pose the following questions: Since we are living in a time period that has been exhaustively investigated by science-fiction literature and films – how do we make sense of a present that doesn’t resemble the fictionalized image? Is there any relationship of correspondence between the futuristic reflections of either progress or doom that we came to expect, and the reality of today? Is there a productive role for inaccurate predictions, and broken expectations?
-Julieta Aranda 2007
Together with the artist Julieta Aranda, Ersta Konsthall continues to explore the notion of fiction and reality. Julieta Aranda focuses on our apprehension of existing structures and how these structures are represented.
By working with different media – installation and video as well as tabloids and crosswords, Aranda undermines the functionality and signification of language.
Words alone are not enough to produce meaning and to describe a situation. The German Literary Theorist Wolfgang Iser, who died earlier this year, wrote that voids and gaps in a text trigger a game with the reader where the reader himself is forced to complete the text. The act of reading becomes performative, intrusive and demanding. The potential of the text, says Iser, lies in the reader’s will to play. The gaps in the text become opportunities for the reader to enter and start to act.
Those gaps and voids become appreciable in Julieta Aranda’s crossword puzzles. She collects words like literary souvenirs – from science fiction, art theory books and pornography – and combines them in thematic and geometrical patterns. The meaning of the new text arises in the tension of the words and the unfilled squares.
Julieta Aranda is one of the founders of e-flux video rental. Her tabloids and installations have been shown in group shows and biannuals across the world, among others at the 9th Lyon Biennial and the 1st Biennial of Architecture and Landscape, Gran Canaria. She received her MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts, New York. Julieta Aranda was born in 1975 in Mexico City.