Mathilde Rosier: In Revolution: Resolution of Some Hierarchic Orders

Curated by Chus Martínez
Coproduced by Nature Addicts Fund
Curatorial Assistant Eveline Wüthrich
 

“Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:
Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.
Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d.
Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.”
 

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down. These verses of an old English ballad serve to introduce the wonder that is performed in the new work of Mathilde Rosier, a celebration of the “turned upside down.” This simple inversion, which changes and challenges everything, belongs to the oldest of our symbolic landscapes: the need for change. Conceived specially for FHNW HGK Institut Kunst’s exhibition space in Basel, der TANK, the installation is divided into two parts. The first consists of an “altar” of drawings of figures upside down, and the second is a large-scale video projection in which a series of dances perform the grace of a universe where the body moves at ease with its feet hanging from the ceiling. Oh! this is a real revolution that may be happening because of the magnificent power of an imagination that’s responding to a chaotic world of a monstruos fusion of values and of incongruous social forms and languages. It is not an allegory; it is real. The dancers celebrate this variation of all the orders we know with a grace that seems demonic, supernatural. They dance to this new naturalness that replaces the unnaturalness of our former lives on the ground.

Like the dancers, the painted figures invoke, from above all of us, the very importance of the top. What see folly’s true perception of a world possessed by the devouring passion of this great discovery. Both the dancers and the represented images announce a state of joy. Unless the 1559 painting of Brueghel there is nothing monster-like in them. Nothing of the antithetic violence of those trying to eat from their anus, for example. No, this divergent species is possessed by a joy that announces the possibility of a logic of being blessed by a love-force, characterized by their noninstrumental encounter with the orders of human and nonhuman. These beings dancing in silence, posing in silence, taste joy. Like Marx they seem to argue that in the absence of money, we can get money only in return for love. Hanging from up there, these humans are closer to animals in their not-being colonized by our former cultural or social systems. And we do feel invited. We feel the warm force that makes us raise our eyes slowly towards the ceiling: Can we do this too? Are they too far or too close? This simple inversion represents the long research of Mathilde Rosier on the possibility of introducing simple rituals, the tempo inside the core of her work. She is interested in exploring a force, a pulse, a vibration, a movement, the production of a duration inside all the works of painting, performance, or film that may be able to challenge the melody of history. We are only part of something larger, and its scope is indeterminate.

This exhibition also represents a very special moment in the short life of Der TANK, the first installment of our work and friendship with the Nature Addicts Fund, who make possible a series of new artistic commissions that will be presented first in Basel and travel thereafter.