Seoul, June 25 – August 14, 2016, http://ilmin.org
For this exhibition the museum has been covered in pitch-black darkness. The Rui Chafes and Petro Costa are two artists that work independently. Chafes creates perfectly shaped steel sculptures with a surreal touch. Costa creates meditative videos with a Bill Viola-like meditative atmosphere, but even greater stillness, usually portraits of individuals or groups, some staring still at the camera/visitor without a single blink while others uttering sentences in a foreign language, providing a ghost like soundtrack to Chafe’s ghost-like sculptures.
One can feel a socially critical undertone in the videos, one displaying a poor working class district somewhere in the slums of some developing country. Another video focuses on an old African face silently looking towards the darkness above and in front, reminiscent of a slave whose only hope is God. The faces are motionless, like ghosts of those who succumbed to society’s injustice.
The sculptures support the ghostly atmosphere, but they do not reference troubled lives. They rather appear as solidified fragments from within our nightmares where the laws of physics are suspended. The shapes are organic and appear to result from airflows and fluid dynamics, yet at the same time they are motionless, hard and threatening in their invisible presence which sometimes can be felt in the dark space before it is visually perceived.
This was an exhibition to be felt and experienced with the body and senses. It was very cinematic and theatrical. The visitor was transformed into a lone actor within the stage of the exhibition setting. The communication took place at a nonverbal level, articulating existential fears and emanating a pathos contained in the large questions which we keep asking despite the futility of the endeavor.
