The ‘Double Reality of Things’
This project investigates the slippage of reality and meaning that occurs when artists create multiple reproductions and copies of things. We question the reproduction of ourselves through multiple copies of artworks as well as the indexical relationship of a repeated concept.
‘Double Fictions’ curated by artist Jesse Hogan & Andrea Istvan Franzini presents recent works by several international artists alongside a collaborative installation exploring speculative and historical entanglements between readymade objects, the repeated image and poetic translations of text. Platforming an exploratory use of materials, the works in this exhibition weave together fiction and dark humour to engage in histories associated with self-reproduction, seriality and extraction in unexpected ways. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of poetic texts and translations by the featured artists and an essay by Japanese photographer and critic Keitaro Niwa.
The concept of the term ‘Double Fiction’ refers to several ideas which are explored through the selected artworks. Ideas such as duplicates, the copy and the original, & ‘editions’ are explored by double copies placed around the installation. This approach simultaneously aims to evoke and remind ourselves of the idea that, to every story and every narrative there exists multiple versions. A Double fiction here recalls that the same story told twice will result in two distinct versions/ scenarios and ie. two different truths. Likewise the same object repeated twice or the reproduction of the photographic image can reveal certain mechanisms that are employed to affect our recognition (interpretation between) or the interplay of things we consider real and things we concede are fake. Traversing between the Real and the fake – In the Virtual FauxREAL.
In an artwork the repetition of form, image or concept can cause a sense of double vision bringing into question the value of sameness or the comparative investigation of one part to another. This complex has been drawn on / explored at length throughout modernism, through Duchump’s Ready-mades and his rational in ‘The Creative Act’, 1956 - in Walter Benjamin’s, Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin examines the original and its mechanical copy or replica in terms of ‘Aura’. The original has the Aura embedded by the artist's physicality and psyche, but the replica is assumed to be void of spirit. In Jean Baudrillard's ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ everything is a copy on an indexical relationship to simulated reproduction.
IDEAS:
• It is interesting here that the connection between exhibited objects and images acquire titles which give the ‘thing’ a historical and conceptual grounding in a trajectory of its development.
• Titles function to with-hold an idea assigned to a particular piece of artwork which without could simply be changed and translated as to be or mean something else in an alternative context.
• A questioning of sameness and difference in two identical ‘things’ opens up a philosophical paradox attaining to reality. Are all things unique in themselves or does the perception of difference articulate essential sameness?
• Artists use text, titles, and poetic language to ground an idea in the space and time of discourse and therefore differentiate between two seemingly similar or Identical things.
