Hackney Wicked Arts Festival 2010
2010-07-21
Hackney Wicked Arts Festival 2010
From 31st July to 29th August 2010
“I see myself there, where I am not”, brings together the work of 10 artists who examine the various ways art is used as a heteropological accessory, a mode realised by the gaze of the viewer, simultaneously representing and unpicking utopian ideals by channeling veins of the uncanny with fantasy, narrative, humour, styles of documentation. Foucault describes the heterotopia as an enacted utopia; a counter-site; a representation; a mirror of something unreal that exists in reality. It is not the reflection that is the heterotopia, but the mirror itself and its surroundings that contain the fiction.
Stretching the length of the far wall of the exhibition space, a ‘picture’ window offers a gratifying panoramic view of the future Olympic city. Like that of the Greek amphitheatre on the hill, overlooking the metropolis in the valley below, this lofty positioning encourages an inherent voyeurism through its segregation. It takes on the properties of viewing booth, through which the flattening of a view, seen from a lofty or private space, is highly exaggerated.
Rather than use this hierarchical perspective to comment directly on the reality laid before it, “I see myself there, where I am not” flips the scenario to imagine that the glass of the window serves, not as the transpicuous barrier between the interior space of the exhibition and exterior space of the world outside, but as a mirror. It places the show within the space of its reflection, and frames each artist’s work as the unattainable vision inside.
