Event Horizon
Raster , Warsaw, Poland
'Event Horizon' (2009), installation view
The 1997 film Event Horizon, directed by Paul W. Anderson, was effectively The Shining (1980) set in space. Remaining within similarly Kubrickian precincts, the exhibition ‘Event Horizon’ at Raster, a group show curated by the Swiss duo Karma International, resembles the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which an astronaut wanders around a well-appointed set of rooms, before being reborn as a space baby.
The immediate product of this show is atmosphere. Because it is so finely balanced, none of the individual works seem at first remarkable, yet as a set they generate a surplus effect: an eerie but oddly friendly feeling, accentuated by the presence of beaten-up armchairs in each of the rooms and the peeling paint of the gallery walls. Raster is a sprawling space which spreads out through the top floor of an apartment block in central Warsaw, incorporating a sort of art shop and lounge, and was manned – when I visited – by a lone young art history student. The general model is Edward Krasiński’s legendary gesamtkunstwerk/apartment; arguably the work at the heart of the Warsaw contemporary art scene.
David Hominal, Le Troue (2009)
‘Event Horizon’ includes works from seven emerging Swiss artists, spread across three rooms, and for a short period featured a supplementary performance space, now defunct. Within the gallery itself the opening scene consists of David Hominal’s corridor-sculpture Through the Window (2009), an assemblage that comprises an armchair, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes and a Polish translation of Andrei Bely’s modernist novel Saint Petersburg (1913, revised 1922). Recounting the story of Russia in 1905, the paperback is one of a pair of literary references made by Hominal. In the large room, Le Troue (2009) comprises the collected works of Victor Hugo, a stake rammed through the middle of their pages. Little squares of paper, scraps displaced by the spike, hang on the wall in three collages. The works recall Marcel Duchamp’s instructions for a window-hung geometry book The Unhappy Readymade (1919). ‘It amused me,’ Duchamp later admitted, ‘to disparage the seriousness of a book full of principles.’
Pamela Rosenkranz, Spill (Prospan) (2008)
The room contains two other sculptures: Pamela Rosenkranz’s Room (2008), a reflecting, two-panel screen made out of dark wood and Plexiglas, and Tobias Madison’s B-movie-esque, alien-like plastic plant, Untitled/Haçienda/237 (2009), one of a pair to be found in the show. Also on the walls, Rosenkranz has two ‘spills’ (perhaps a reference to the slang term for stock film filler), Spill (Prospan) and Spill (Pascofeminin) (both 2008), and Fabian Marti has an Inkjet print called The Will (2008), which appears to have been made by etching photo-quality paper with a compass and ruler. A neat trick. The room is ‘signed’ by Valentin Carron’s mysterious scrawled graffiti: ‘Wasi prszyjaciele, wasi kochani, wasze klopoty’ (Your friends, your loved ones, your problems, 2009), which takes up most of one wall.
Left: Emanuel Rossetti, Chopped & Screwed (3D) (2009); right: Tobias Madison, Office Tropique/696/Dubai 2012 (2009)
Minus the graffiti and the unhappy Hugos, the second room is otherwise similar to the first. Madison’s second tropical plant, Office Tropique/696/Dubai 2012 (2009), is here, along with three framed Inkjet prints of multi-coloured computer-generated toruses (Emanuel Rossetti’s Chopped & Screwed (3D), 2009). Marti’s second contribution hangs another a wall: another Inkjet print, entitled Another Future (2008).
A paper triangle by Annelise Coste, Don’t tell me everything is market (2008), occupies one wall of the art shop. Amongst the items on sale in is a CD of songs devoted to the Polish poet and soldier Wladyslaw Broniewski, the legacy of a previous exhibition devoted to the figure, which the assistant puts on after receiving instructions via SMS from her boss.
Another contemporary name associated with the idea of the ‘event’ is Alain Badiou, author of the mighty tome Being and Event (2006). Badiou’s influence is said to be growing in Poland, as it is peaking elsewhere, and his spare, mystagogical vocabulary of Events, Truths, Ones, Twos is gaining increasing prominence on the Internet. Not unrelatedly, ‘Event Horizon’ includes in its own vocabulary Lacanian toruses, ‘68-style slang, alien plants, a socialist realist soundtrack (for sale) and a classic story of revolution sitting in an empty chair.
Daniel Miller
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