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Rooms of Now #8

Jessika Khazrik

Evenement

1 november 2021 – 28 februari 2022
Verschillende locaties

Curator: Luuk Vulkers

Rooms of Now #8 | Jessika Khazrik

On the Shape of the Sphere

Jessika Khazrik

Installatie, Architecturale interventie
2021

Deze tekst is alleen beschikbaar in het Engels

For the eighth edition of Rooms of Now, Vleeshal commissioned the Lebanese artist, composer, technologist and indisciplinary practitioner Jessika Khazrik to make a new, process-oriented artwork. Khazrik chose to rethink the format of this local nomadic program, in the wake of a pandemic that asked us to reassess the notion of physical presence altogether. Usually, for Rooms of Now, an artist is invited to make new work for a Middelburg home; a domestic space which is then opened to the public for a brief period of time. Khazrik's project turned this formula inside out. She invited four international students from Middelburg's University College Roosevelt to collaborate with her. Together, they made the largely ephemeral On The Shape of the Sphere from the privacy of their own dorm rooms. For this project, Khazrik has never set foot in Middelburg, and the public also never stepped foot in these student dorm rooms. So what actually happened there during these weeks?

On the Shape of the Sphere delved into network cosmology, the politics and aesthetics of knowledge representation through the recurrence of spheric shapes on and beyond our –also very spheric– planet. In contemporary western science, knowledge is often ramified into isolated disciplines and commonly represented as a tree with many branches. Something that can grow in regimes of visibility and invisibility. In several cosmologies of knowledge, however, knowledge is and was thought of as far more globular: a nonhierarchical unity, within which different elements, notions, categories and concepts are interconnected in a way that we have been labelled as associative, esoteric and irrational. Interestingly, in Western epistemology and cosmography, a gradual change in thinking about the shape of our earth (from flat to round) roughly coincided with a shifting conception of knowledge from sphere to tree (from round to flat).

The four students that Khazrik worked with for this project can also be considered to make up for a spheric harmony of knowledge themselves. They come from four different disciplines that the artist deems fundamental: art, medicine, law and engineering. The project consisted of four different 'orbits' that Khazrik orchestrated on remote, each of which brought new elements of sound, open hardware sensing devices, objects, video and text to the students, learning not only through and in disciplines but also through history and spatiality. Subjects as diverse as solar storms, contraction cycles in muscular movement, ultrasonic levitation and early satellite systems are all interconnected in Khazrik's cosmos. While On the Shape of the Sphere was, at its core, a private and ephemeral project, executed mostly from the safe confinements of four student dorm rooms, fragments of this bygone artwork are projected into digital space.

Serie

Rooms of Now is een reeks projecten waarbij een (inter)nationale kunstenaar wordt uitgenodigd om een artistieke interventie te ontwikkelen bij mensen thuis, in Middelburg. De titel is ontleend aan een fotografieproject van kunstenaar Maurice van Es, die de eerste editie van Rooms of Now realiseerde. De serie vond plaats van 2019–2022.

Rooms of Now is de opvolger van het publieksprogramma So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood.

In 2015 is Vleeshal gestart met haar Nomadisch Programma, als een verlenging van het bestaande tentoonstellingsprogramma in Middelburg. Voor het nomadisch programma gaat Vleeshal op reis en organiseert programma's in samenwerking met culturele partners in binnen- en buitenland, zoals Amsterdam Art Weekend, Art Rotterdam, Spring Performance Festival, Poppositions, Brussel en WIELS Art Book Fair, Brussel.

Dit project is mede mogelijk gemaakt door de financiële steun van het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap en gemeente Middelburg.