Speaking power to (post) truth

Jane Lombard Gallery presents the group exhibition Speaking Power to (Post) Truth, curated by writer and curator Sara Raza, recently the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for the Middle East and North Africa. The exhibition brings together a constellation of five contemporary international artists Ergin Çavuşoğlu, James Clar, Mounir Fatmi, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Shahpour Pouyan. Their work comes together to reveal a complex pattern of inquiry that seeks to explore deep associations with human consciousness and (post) truth, referencing important historical, literary, social, and political issues.
"Two large scale site-responsive installations by Kaabi-Linke and Çavuşoğlu form numerous central discursive threads through the exhibition. These works examine the mechanics behind the production of bias and reflect on the cultural impact of conscious and unconscious bias. Çavuşoğlu presents Silent Systems, a 2011 interactive work which evokes Noah’s Arc via a 3D rendered ship. The audience can interact with the drawing by walking across its surface - their movements are recorded by a security camera; the recordings are relayed to a monitor, which displays the audience seemingly waking inside a sculpture. Through these devices the work connects migration, consciousness and surveillance, and has visual and thematic links to Çavuşoğlu’s 2012 work And I Awoke."
"Another site-specific work made in configuration with the gallery’s architecture is an anamorphic floor drawing by London-based artist Ergin Cavusoglu entitled Silent Systems (2011). The drawing is composed of a 3D render of a building and a ship and references Noah’s Arc one of the first major migratory vessels. Audiences are invited to interact with the drawing by walking across its entire surface and this act is recorded via a security camera, which relays this interaction onto a monitor that displays surreal images of what appears as though audiences are walking within a sculpture. The performance of walking reinvents the drawing as a liminal work that resists fixed narratives and combines several contrasting elements that explore temporality and spatial dynamics. Both works highlight the viral nature of materials that have the ability to spiral and create new visual maps into what constitutes as the real and speak to a set of highly complicated paradoxical social, cultural and political conditions."