My, my. A Body Does Get Around
Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam
January 5 – March 29, 2015
with
Artun Alaska Arasli
Christiane Blattmann,
Elif Erkan
Yuki Kishino
Nicholas Riis
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Notes for a Film in India” is a documentary about post-independent India in which Pasolini travels around the country interviewing locals and scouting for potential locations and actors, ( essentially “collecting” notes for a film to be made), searching for a king who could feed his body to a family of starving tigers. The documentary, however unconcise, “uneconomic”, and incomplete (as the film was never made), is essentially predominantly strong in its disposition as an anti-systematic entity, and alertly confident in its transmutation as it stands firmly both as a sketch that requires further completion and as a poetic conception of an idea that is self-presenting.
The sculptures and videos in “My, My. A Body Does Get Around.”, are inspired by this idea of a self-sufficient proposition. They investigate topics of art history, architecture, theatre, fetishization of images, the body and its mobility and limitations. Breaking apart various interpretations of knowledge through poetics (in its vision as an excess of language), they propose a view in comprehending a system of fragmented and incomplete knowledge that is made up of intermittent ideas rather than a collection of partialities that is absolute.
The exhibition borrows its title from a line uttered by the protagonist in William Faulkner’s 1932 novel “Light in August”, Lena Grove, an expectant mother who simultaneously bears the promise of a child and of the completion of her quest as she travels on foot through the Southern United States, looking for her unborn child’s father, Lucas Burch. The allegory of the pregnant, traveling body as it traverses time and space and its (self-constituted) desire to complete multiple quests (largely irrespective of their outcomes) is similar to the dissolution brought forth by the duality of the idea and its resolution. The body’s rest is an illusion: as it ceases to move around, although at rest from motion, it still bears a gravitational pull. Similarly, the presentation of the artwork is incomplete, as it is a fragment and always becoming, engaged in an “act of annihilation”, it is “hence caught in an unceasing progress through which the idea as ideality, that is, as future fulfilment, is presented—although only in a fragmentary way”.*
After giving birth and confronting the father (who runs away from her towards the end of the novel), it becomes apparent that Lena Grove’s quest is self-sufficient and never resolved, the act of searching is the quest and it lacks of limitation as long as her body may allow her to get around.
At the very end of the novel, as she is leaving the cart, she says to its driver: “My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint [sic] been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee”, and begins a renewed search for Lucas Burch with her newborn baby.
Curated by Artun Alaska Arasli