[Nettime-nl] TAUTOLOGY | Opening Sat. May 5, 21.00 h.

SMART Project Space | 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam

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

TAUTOLOGY | May 6 - Juni 10, 2001
Work by Caros Bayala, Ulli Knall, Szuper Gallery, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha,
Ben Pruskin. Curated by Lennaart van Oldenborgh

Opening Reception May 5, 21:00h

TAUTOLOGY is not the same exhibition twice. It exhibits work from artists
for whom tautology is a strategy, a visual and conceptual device.
Tautology in this case is not limited to the strictly semantic sense of a
repetition in meaning, but it encompasses 'visual tautologies' (favoured
for example by Andy Warhol and René Magritte) and imaginary constructions
that rely on duplication or circularity to set up two or more terms with
equivalent meanings. In a rhetorical sense, you could say that tautology
is an argument that 'explains' itself by restating itself.

Carlos Bayala uses visual duplication to address questions of visual and
narrative perception. His recent work "Anima" is a four-panelled video
projection depicting farm animals that have been dressed up in painterly
renditions of themselves. By layering two different media, painting and
video, Bayala draws attention to the fact that the horse 'inhabits' its
photograhic image (or videographic image) in much the same way that, in
this case, it inhabits its own painterly image.

Ulli Knall makes ceramic sculptures of Shapeshifters: aliens that can
change their shape to take on a human (or humanoid) form. Shapeshifting
can be seen as a metaphor for sculpture itself: manipulating an 'alien'
material to look human, or at least like something it isn't. But Knall's
work also raises quesions about the duplication of identites that are
possible in a world in which self-transformation has become the norm.

Szuper Gallery has functioned as a free-floating gallery environment since
it emerged from the financial ruins of the 'real' Szuper Gallery in Munich
a few years ago. It is run by a group of artists who use the gallery name
as a metaphor for an art practice within an institutional context; they
have become a parasitical gallery-within-a-gallery which sponges off other
institutions to examine the function of artists and art institutions in
society.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha shows "Monolith", in which he presents the lyrics
of Robbie Williams' "Millenium" in the manner of the opening graphics of
"Star Wars". With a title that refers to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space
Odyssey", Carneiro da Cunha invites the viewer to consider the contrasts
between contemporary popular culture and the grand visions of the future
which the prospect ot the turn of the millenium inspired in the past.

Ben Pruskin is showing a new installation that combines classical music
with a host of multicoloured monitors in an otherwise bare and sterile
space. On one of the monitors words appear one by one in varying speed,
forming a text that seems to keep turning back on itself, like a circular
story in which the beginning is simultaneously the end.

TAUTOLOGY is an exhibition in which repeating something means changing that
something. In each of the works in this exhibition, circular or repetitive
constructions alter the 'first readings' of the images (and texts)
involved, and in doing so put forward questions about the nature of
artistic conventions (and by extension about the nature of language). It
is one approach to prise open the fabric of language, creating room for
voices that otherwise couldn't be heard.

Sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam, Mondriaan Stichting, Mentrum, Brand
Bier

SMART Project Space | www.smartprojectspace.net
1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, NL-1054 BW Amsterdam
Opening times: Tuesday-Sunday 12.00-20.00 hrs.
Post Office Box 15004, NL-1001 MA Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 427.5951 / 5952 | Fax.: +31 20 427.5953
Email: info@smartprojectspace.net

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