25.05.2023 performance Personal Boundaries at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli.
Personal Boundaries – Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia
The performance at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in the space of Fondamenta degli Incurabili is part of the project Personal Boundaries. The place and the time naturally changes the meaning of an idea which comes and develops through a different inspirations: the absurd scеnario of the movie “Bubble Boy”, the works of artists such as Hans Haake and “Condensation Cube”, Christo and Jeanne-Claude their works “Air Package” and “Big Air Package”, the concepts of “Memento mori” and the changes in social life in recent years. The challenge to draw the world around us as we see it is easier said than done, our excistence and subjectivity transforms every moment of the reality.
Personal Boundaries - Pont des Arts, Paris
Inspired by the story the visual artists Yagmur and Yulian Stankulovs came up with the idea for the project “Personal Boundaries”. Their experiment explores human perceptions and relationships with the reality. To find out more about the subjectivizing role of the artist, the authors made drawings on transparent plexiglass panels. They “copy” the images in front of them on a clear base and assume that this approach would bring an accurate depiction of reality. But even the slightest movement, their own breath, leads to the disparity of the drawn lines with the objects behind them. In second attempt the new lines displace or overlap with the first ones. According to these experiments the exact reproduction of objective reality is impossible. From the moment the artist touches the surface begin the inevitable processes of subjectivization.
The place of the performance was chosen because of its symbolism. Many people have written about it, but the words of the famous art historian Kenneth Clark in his book “Civilization” seem fair enough to describe it: I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On one side of the Seine is the harmonious, reasonable facade of the Institute of France, built as a college in about 1670. On the other bank is the Louvre, built continuously from the Middle Ages. Across this bridge, for the last one hundred and fifty years, students from the art schools of Paris have hurried to the Louvre to study the works of art that it contains, and then back to their studios to talk and dream of doing something worthy of the great tradition.”
Something surprising happens during the performance: the differences between the inside and outside climate brings the experiment in another unexpected direction. From the moment the artist enters the sphere the process of condensation begin. As a result the solid lines of the drawing on the transparent surface gradually turn into transparent outlines on the already blurred base. Only the lines of the drawing remain the places from where the reality can be seen outside the sphere.
