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.
