Matti Braun, parallel universes and science fiction.

     Matti Braun, 'S.R.' (2002-Ongoing)                       Picture acquired from here

This guy! Okay now this, this is what I'm talking about!

"The main hall of the Kunstverein Freiburg is full of water, from which the museum’s mighty pilasters rise like the modern furniture in the director’s villa in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. The 1930s building, with its huge ceiling window, seems to straddle a natural pool after Matti Braun lined the floor of the former baths with sheeting and filled it up. The black mirror of the pool is interspersed with circular slices of tree trunk, allowing daring visitors to cross the hall by jumping from one to the next. The title of this piece, and of the exhibition - S. R. - stands for Braun’s inspiration, the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. But the exhibition also explores science fiction, the visual poems of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, Steven Spielberg and the dark waters that carry culture from one continent to another." - http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/matti_braun/

Yes yes bloody hell yes!

The reason I get so excited about this is because Braun is interested in what I'm interested in, and I've been finding it excruciatingly hard to find artists with the same interests (e.g. Science Fiction, Animation, Science in general, Geek subjects 101 etc etc). I can find a thousand who can talk politics and other cultural subjects I'm interested in, like participation or emancipation blah blah. But I find it hard to find artists who love geeky things such as I, and who execute their ideas profoundly well, and exhibit them successfully!

Well I just found an entire exhibition of artists, based around the idea of the Parallel Universe.

www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/2012/03/20/parallel-universe-in-brief/

So happy.

"One of the central themes of popular entertainment today is the idea of a parallel universe. The Hollywood dream factory provides a constant barrage of escapism based on the pleasure of temporarily suspending all responsibilities of daily life and being transported to an alternative reality. Meanwhile, the new global world order is made up of multiple conflicting realities existing side by side. A Parallel Universe is a year long series of exhibitions, film, music, talks, performance and special events taking place in 2012, exploring alternative realities and co-existing worlds.

In the context of globalisation and instant communications around the planet it is no longer possible to argue that there is one privileged reality. Old certainties no longer stand and the super-rich live literally next door to the super-poor. Even the idea of universal human rights can be questioned as a Western tool for furthering its own ideological interests, in the name of ‘freedom’. If narratives of history are seen to be conditional, benefiting particular social and economic interests, re-telling histories becomes a significant part of creating new realities, and uncovering idiosyncratic pockets of forgotten history.

Thus A Parallel Universe explores the notion of multifold worlds, possible, parallel, fictional, desired worlds, worlds different to the one we live in." - http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/2012/03/20/parallel-universe-in-brief/

I think I just confirmed my theme for 'Curate and Critique'

Check out the link to the Arnolfini website at the bottom of my blog. There's some seriously sweet stuff on there.