ARTISTS: ANGELIKA THON | CHRISTIAN F. SCHILLER | NIKOS ZACHARIADIS | VASILI MACHARADZE |KLAUS MEßNER | MUTUAL LOOP | LENA GÄTJENS | PAUL PRITZ | ALEKSANDRA KUBIAK | JASMINA TOPIĆ | WERNER SCHIMPL | K.ADA
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. Solaris, Stanisław Lem.
The project SOLARIS is inspired by Stanisław Lem’s book of the same title. In this futuristic novel, a scientist tries to explore and understand a planet-sized extraterrestrial organism. Confronted with such complete otherness, he learns not only about the limits of his understanding as a human being, but his problems of contact with full emotions, with other people, and even with his innermost „other“ when being faced with incarnations from his own unconfronted past. Solaris is a planet, an intellectual ocean, which we may consider as a metaphor for the world or for undefined space where we deal with what is different from that otherwise experienced or known, where our standard values and experiences are suspended. The Human race is presented as a complex mechanism for transmitting information and for furthering a common sense of identity.
Photos © Ulrike Rauch
The poem СПУТНИК LOVE refers to both the Soviet space satellite and the title Sputnik Sweetheart, a famous novel by Haruki Murakami. The word "sputnik" is entitled to a person who accompanies other(s), and therefore, pieces of the puzzle are set to create the meaning, leading to some of the main ideas in this project. It explores the keywords such as space, discover, Other, unknown, emotion, limits, identity, etc. I would say that the main theme in my poem would be how we react to Others and how they echo in ourselves; then how this can expand human communications and emotions. On the other hand, it provokes us to search within ourselves, our micro-universe, "dark passages and secret chambers" to reach for a higher knowledge or truth. The one with which we can then reach outer space.
The poem СПУТНИК LOVE by Jasmina Topic, originally read by the author and then translated into four languages, Georgian, Greek, Polish and German, and read by the artists participating in the exhibition, is a sound installation that is reproduced in the part of the tunnel from Dom im Berg to Karmelitenplatz. The intention of this collective work is to create acoustic chaos around the viewer. The sound composition confronts and confuses the viewer in a space which is actually already a strange, dark place.
