[Nettime-bold] SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE

["SMART Project Space" <tom@smartprojectspace.net>]

SMART Project Space | 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam

requests the pleasure of your company at the exhibition opening of:

SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE | Mark Bain, Elisabetha Benassi, Voebe de
Gruyter, Stephanie Kratz, Jacqueline Pennell, Hideyuki Sawayanagi, Yokomizo
Shizuka | Curated by Samuel-Fuyumi Namioka.

Saturday June 16, 21.00 hours - late | After opening party with deejay
Arnold.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrap in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

Even as we step into a new millennium, many spectres we inherited from the
last century are still haunting us. Though postmodern doubt has proceeded to
rid itself of what the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has called
'grand narritives', (such universal categories as History, Truth, Art,
etc.), they are still persisting in the present as shadows of our thoughts
and actions. Such ghosts of history also exist in the small narratives of
our daily lives, as expressed in the above quoted lines of T.S. Eliot. The
text is inspired by the account of an Antarctic expedition. Eliot explains
in his original note: "It was related that the party of explorers, at the
extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one
more member then could actually be counted". This awareness of an unreal
presence could be thought of as the testimony of an otherworldly existence
in our physical world, but it could also be attributed to causes of
psychological nature. Feeling the presence of an absent person can occur for
example after somebody has died, or can be caused by a delirious state of
being. But there are many other forms of shadow lives that live among us.
The power of memory to transport us out of the present to people and places
long past plays an important role in experiences of unreal presence. It is
related to a notion of time that is not linear, but opens up a spatial
simultaneity in which unrelated events become connected and exist together.
Sometimes memories can be more real then the present as the French writer
Marcel Proust experienced. In Remembrance of Things Past he relived his own
past through the act of writing. As happened with Proust upon dipping a
Madeleine in tea, it is the seemingly insignificant objects and events that
can become a doorway to past times. The works in this exhibition survey
different aspects of such experiences of unreal presence in the small
narratives of daily life.

SMALL NARRATIVES: UNREAL PRESENCE is sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam,
Mondriaan Stichting, Mentrum, Brand Bier, Beam Systems, Yakult Europe BV

SMART Project Space | www.smartprojectspace.net
Exhibition Space: 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20
Office: Keizersgracht 720, NL-1017 EW Amsterdam
Mail to: P.O.Box 15004, NL-1001 MA Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 427.5951 / 427.5952
Phone/fax.: +31 20 420.6028
Email: info@smartprojectspace.net

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