Doppelgänger. Reality’s Double
File
Works on exhibition
DOPPELGÄNGER. Reality's Double was the project that won the MARCO Award for Young Curators in its first edition. A group exhibition curated by Montserrat Albores Gleason about the problem of recording reality from different perspectives, from substituting the "real" event by its multiplication or deformation, to its reviews or, for instance, its rewritings. The show gathers up to 12 works including projections, videoprojections, installations, paintings, sculptures and engravings.
MARCO Award for young curators
In July 2006 was announced the first edition of MARCO's Award for Young Curators, an initiative organized by Fundación MARCO to encourage the work and the training of new professionals in exhibition management and in the curatorial field. This call - conceived as a yearly continuous event - is intended for developing an exhibition project for the galleries on the first floor. Now we open this exhibition from the winner project, an idea of Montserrat Albores Gleason - independent curator born in Mexico in 1974 - which coincides with the call of the second edition of the award.
The jury, composed by Eva González-Sancho, director of FRAC Bourgogne, France; Juan de Nieves, artistic director of EACC, Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló; Javier Pérez Buján, director of Fundación Laxeiro, Vigo; Miguel Wandschneider, curator of Culturgest Lisbon, Portugal; and Iñaki Martínez Antelo, director of MARCO, selected this proposal amongst 48 projects received in total.
Summary
Doppelgänger is a German term which refers to the ghostly double of a living person. The term comes from doppel, which means "double", and gänger, translated as "errant", and it is used to name anyone's double, usually referring to the "satanic twin" or to the phenomenon of bi-location.
DOPPELGÄNGER. Reality's Double is a group show about the problem of representation and about those systems used to affect reality; systems that suggest equivalences games -multiplication or deformation of an event, its reviews or, for instance, its rewritings- those substituting the event itself. Just as in Borges' idea of the urban map, what happens when at the time of drawing a city map you recreate the city with its exact dimensions?
The works included in this exhibition speak of the multiple rewritings of a reality that is gradually losing its original point of reference. Samuel Beckett's Krapp is rewritten in Pablo Sigg's reading room, a silent theatrical performance that finds its counterpoint in the drama recreated by Javier Téllez based on Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, a loose adaptation of the classical myth that becomes an obvious, although not unique, point of reference. These derivations give rise to plays of equivalencies, deformations, multiplications and condensations of that original fact and, at the same time, new links that are filed away in the memory of the resulting piece. Francis Alÿs reactivates a fiction to create a reality, recreating an already enacted action in the streets of Mexico. Elin Wikström takes a real event and builds from it a series of realities which gradually blur that original reference through the process of repetition. The repetition of an action is used by Luc Tuymans as a starting point for rethinking an everyday circumstance that occurred in the life of the Dutch writer J. van Oudshoom. This same name, together with that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, is evoked by Pierre Huyghe in his revised version of Uccellacci e uccellini; and we associate the duo Jean Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, who inspired the piece created by artist Kerry Tribe, with well-known works already provided with new meanings and reconverted in process and source. José Carlos Martinat resurrects the oral tradition of the Incas about an event that took place in the 16th Century, and in the dual projection of a walnut tree recorded at two different times, Ady Carrión summarises the condensation of process that is fragmented and reunited at the time of the exhibition.
With their pieces, the selected artists draw groups of interrelated derivations, of quotes, like those on which Walter Benjamin reflected at length after jotting them down in his little black notebooks. These quotes duplicate, mingle, rewrite and contaminate, as examples of the meetings of fictions and realities that we survey in the exhibition, where references intersect, where events "that begin at the limits of other events" come together, as the exhibition curator points out.
Artists
Ady Carrión
Elin Wikström
Francis Alÿs
Javier Téllez
José Carlos Martinat
Kerry Tribe
Luc Tuymans
Pablo Sigg
Pierre Huyghe
Curatorial text
"In the particulars of his conscious behaviour, the "primitive,"
the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been
previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has been done. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others."
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
"The double to which we refer here does not seek union with its Other, nor does it suffer any lack because of its fragmentation. It is a double whose evolution depends on its ability to multiply, therefore it is not a question of dualities or opposites. It is a double that constantly rewrites its replica and in the process, it supplants and deforms that which appears to be its original. It acknowledges no double or origin; it dwells in this ambiguity, reappearing in events prior to its existence, within which it regenerates. In its repetition, this double ceases to be itself, returning its mode of operating to a primordial mythical moment. It recalls an a-historical reality in which linear sequence is broken and our link with history is thus called into question. It has turned into both a score and the deformation of the score. It results from the generation of systems of equivalence which distort and supplant reality rather than translating it.
DOPPELGÄNGER. Reality's Double arises from a desire to re-examine practices linked to the presence of pre-existing events, substituting the problem of the creation of isolated images for that of the creation of chains, or courses of events, wherein all the parts correspond amongst themselves. This exhibition is the conjunction of events that begin at the limits of other events. It aims to map out a passable route along which, ideally, the archetypal moments to which we decide to return will appear, and where the object exists as long as another one did prior to it. It goes from the myth of the Incan to the thousands of texts produced online; from Thebes to a ghost town in Aspen; from Krapp listening to and recording tapes to the inaudible graphicalization of the text, and then to a yellow plastic tapir. From Uccellacci e uccellini to its re-creation. From buying a gun on Palma Street to buying another gun on Palma Street. From Camille Virollaud to Audrey Wollen. From J. van Oudshoorn's postcard to La Correspondance, and hence to its scale model and plans. From one shot of a walnut tree to another. From Herr Weimar's narration to Elin Wikström's. We go from 2007 to the English version of 1958, from the French version of 1959 to 1958, from the German version of 1969 to 1958. We go from circa 430 BC to Austria 1856 and from there back to 2006. From 2002 to the twelve movements of 1978. From the suburbs of Rome in 1993 to the suburbs of Rome in 1966. From Berlin in 1905 to 1985, and from there to the 1986 scale model. From spring 2007 to winter 2006. From the first encounter with the myth in 1955 to the sixteenth century, and from there to eighteenth-century oral tradition. From the early hours of November 4, 1999 to one o'clock in the afternoon on November 4; from 2007 to Münster in 1997; from Stockholm in 1998 and back to Berlin in 1997, and from there to Vigo, the year in course."
Montserrat Albores Gleason
Exhibition's Curator
Curator
Montserrat Albores Gleason
Montserrat Albores Gleason, independent curator born in Mexico in 1974, has written many exhibition projects for galleries and museums of Mexico and the United States. She was director of Galería OMR (Mexico City) between 2003 and 2004, where she curated the shows devoted to Thomas Glassford, Carla Arocha, Cisco Jiménez or Pablo Vargas Lugo, among others. Between 1999 and 2000 she directed Acceso A Gallery (Mexico City), where she curated exhibitions dedicated to Santiago Sierra or Brooks Brothers. She has organized several shows for Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, where she also worked as a curator, and she was invited to Documenta_11 Kassel (2002), where she took part in the symposium for young critics on that international exhibition.
