Mouthless is an exhibition by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė that takes place between WallRiss and Fri Art Kunsthalle.

Thank you to: Fritz Schiffers, Erik Raynal, Juliette Ruetz, Julia Moritz, Juno Moritz, Azur Sabic, Amadeus Vogelsang, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc., cottweiler, Ninamounah, Mainline:RUS/Fr.CA/DE, CC-steding jewelry, Roni Ilan, Fila, Ocularis and Kara.

A three-part discussion on the beatitude of everyday life, the fantasy of transcendence, the bodily practices and the cosmic folklore.

The subjective choice announced here is associated with the "affinity" choice, a method chosen to have an exhibition that reflects a current situation in pictorial production. This method rationalizes a decision-making process, based on subjective judgments supposed to be close to personal experience, unlike an objective judgment based outside the individual. The "affinity" method would thus produce the desired effect: that of gathering pictorial practices that deal with the status of the image, its circulation and saturation.

However, images are now processed by autonomous algorithmic processes, which develop their own way of classifying images in a new visualization model, independently of the human eye that has long governed these codes and organized their logic. In the context of a new economy that extracts the value of our cognitive abilities, what specificity allows the subjective method "by affinity"? If the goal is to get out of an objective judgment as a form of pure rationality, what are the criteria for this selection? Whose desires, whose goals? Are there decision-making processes that address individual values and preferences and respect integrity outside of an automatic process?

The artists presented at WallRiss, chosen by affinity, all present a relevant way of dealing with contemporary pictorial issues. WallRiss, by choosing to use the "affinity" method, suggests that its own technique should also be observed here. The individual preferences that form judgments are not based solely on taste, but depend more broadly on a set of values, which can therefore be modified, and thus modify the method itself. Observing the techniques means taking the method as the basis of organization, as the framework within which the different choices are made.

30.08
Dominic Michel
Rencard
Laurent Quartier

01.09
Caroline Schattling Villeval
Thibault Villard
Sayaka Mizuno & Anaïs Wenger

The first room of the show doesn’t have a body—just a head losing itself in repetitions and watching out of the space. There are no figures here but all the pieces have a strong physical presence; from three still-vibrating little paintings to a dark lunar shield. Or each can be a garment, all of them in different ways, sometimes that’s better than constantly trying to be too coherent with yourself. Have I been very good lately?

Maybe all of the works together form a body, like an exquisite corpse: a buttery floral relief folds over into a saturated, (un)zippered surface; like a beautiful chimera or Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creature.

In the center of the room a video talking about life slips suddenly into love—a very abstracted body born of a certain desire. Is that body what surrounds her, and you, watching her? What’s your position: Do you really want to stand between those two forces? As if between two lovers just starting to discover each other.

You can leave now or enter even more into my problems. Who are my new friends?

Behind the wall the body is manifest but morphs into multiple shapes, while everything around you fades, traveling very far away, as those desires become more implicit and the head and his restless mind dissolve. Just floating in a soft space. You can melt here like in an opium dream while an acid sun sinks behind a pink window, or turn and leave, only now at the end of the tunnel a misty landscape rises, of an ancient, exotic place. If you enter there you can totally disappear.
Will you be my eclipse, or will I be yours? Do you like my new shoes?

Vorrei e non vorrei
    — Zerlina, “Là ci darem la mano”, Don Giovanni

I can’t go on, I’ll go on
    — Samuel Becket, « The Unnamble »

Either it is raining or it is not states a simple principle known as the principle of non-contradiction : no contradiction is true. Following this principle, it cannot be the case that the proposition « It is raining » is true and the negation of this proposition, « It is not raining », is also true. The conjunction « It is raining and it is not raining » cannot be true, because nothing can be true and false.

If contradictions were true, nothing could be meaningful. Something is indeed meaningful only if it excludes something : a claim that rules out nothing, says nothing. This goes further : if a proposition (like « It is raining ») does not rule out the negation of the proposition (« It is not raining »), it rules out nothing. The premiss here is the following : a proposition is meaningful if and only if it rules out something. But is this true ? Consider the claim « Everything is true ». This rules nothing out : it entails everything. But the claim is meaningful, since we can test it (it is false, not everything is true). Moreover, the negation of the claim, « Something is not true », is meaningful (and true).

However, in a range of ambivalence, contradictions lies at heart of value judgment. Often, speakers affirm contradictions of the form « a (a proposition) is v (a value judgment like « good », « bad », etc.) and a is not v ». When affirmed in full awareness, what can be said of the people holding those contradictions ? They believe them and do not believe them, like illustrated by the « Sorry not sorry » or « I’m not sayin’ I’m just sayin’ » trending meme on social medias. In marketing strategies, « work not work » has been taken by Samsonite (the luggages), « Guilty not guilty » by Gucci.

Sometimes, in cases close to irony, it is the recognition of the apparent contradiction that the speaker exploits to generate the higher-order coherence of the message : Not punk enough to be punk but not not punk enough to be not punk. Another way to produce an effect is to use contradiction involving prosody (playing on auditory measure such as tone) : He’s still great, but he’s not GREAT.

Either it is raining or it is not (at a particular space and time) is therefore a proposition about certain operations inside a frame. Playing on the dry formalism of contradictions and the way they move throughout a determinate logical system, it uses the shifting and entailments inside an operative framework to act on a certain rationalization of the exhibition. Outside of a usual pathway, the works in WallRiss perform at the intersection between exposure and retreating. They voyage then as a vessel : as a sign of previous arrivals and departures, a threshold between worlds, a contact zone for communities across time. As Sherlock Holmes states in the « Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax », it is in this kind of in-between that one finds the truth : « Now we will take another line of reasoning. When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth. »

Dans cet espace entre le dehors et le dedans d’une certaine proposition (et donc d’une stratégie) artistique, les rapports particuliers sont redistribués et les enjeux déplacés. Le « joint » est le lieu de l’articulation, qui lie chair et os, le lieu qui organise et configure. Cet entre-deux permet une approche qui n’est pas une opposition, un renversement sans contradiction. La frise en métal brossée agit donc comme un miroir. Entre le réel et son reflet, elle traverse tout l’espace du WallRiss dans un prolongement interrompu par le passage entre les deux salles. Ce passage, lui-même un point de jonction entre deux lieux, sorte de passage initiatique entre un premier espace et un deuxième, est déchargé de sa position symbolique en étant ramené à sa seule fonction d’ouverture. Il s’agit d’un deuxième renversement, une redistribution des cartes symboliques dans l’espace. Furniture of Time ne propose ni une union ni une séparation des lignes architecturales de l’espace mais suit une balance entre les deux, dans un rituel de l’inversion.

Les différents éléments de l’exposition - la frise, la pièce sculpturale, les néons aux intensités différentes, la vidéo - soutiennent une lecture latérale. C’est un récit sans orientation narrative, jouant sur une perspective glissant dans un entre-mondes. Dans une constante fragilité d’équilibre pour éviter de fixer cet entre-deux et de positionner le spectateur, Furniture of Time fait suivre le glissement de perspective sur les pièces de l’environnement architectural, empêchant de fixer des délimitations précises par une perturbation des frontières.

1. Epistemic claim (about what can be known or conceived by a person)
2. Modal claim (about what is possible or necessary)
3. Metaphysical claim (about the nature of things in the world)

By conceivability, we consider a notion where an act of imagination plays a role. We say then that S (a statement like « pigs could fly ») is conceivable when one can modally imagine a situation where S is the case (a situation where pigs could fly). Modally imagining is a form of perceptual imagination : a subject has a perceptual mental image that represents S as being the case. This forming of a perceptual image of S is done by the subject in such a way that is is possible for him to fill in arbitrary details in the imagined situation. Here, this is nothing more than imagining a certain situation (or having a perceptual image) where pigs could fly, and imagining in such a way that it is possible to add details if necessary, for example if one is asked where the wings are positioned on the body of the pig. Then, if, with the filling in of those details, no contradiction reveals itself in the situation, then S is conceivable. A contradiction may occur, for example, if in a certain situation one imagines an impossible case, for example a logical impossibility. Therefore, we say that a statement S is conceivable when it is modally imaginable in the way just described.

This method of reasoning reveals the three steps mentioned at the beginning and the link, inside the reasoning, between a statement that is epistemic (having to do with knowledge) and a statement that is metaphysic (having to do with the nature of things in the world). This is so because conceivability, as a modal concept, is intimately linked to the rational domain, and therefore the purposes and goals that such arguments carry are closely tied to the rational and the psychological. In other words, metaphysical possibilities are determined by our cognitive apparatus and the tools of reasoning with their rational constraints.

If this is so, then the entailment from conceivability to possibility is grounded on a rational modal concept and epistemic and metaphysical domains are bridged by rationality. It is precisely around this bridging that If it’s Conceivable it’s Possible deploys itself. Focusing on the personal reception, the exhibition takes the viewer as the narrative node where a new process of construction takes place, where then what is at the center is the idea of a transformation, the idea of a shifting inside a unified narrative. Taking only the structure of the rational argument, this shifting does not obey to the rules and constraints of logical derivation, it operates in his own way, here by integration of two narratives corresponding to two moments at the core of the participation of an exhibition : anticipation (the projection of what a future experience will be like) and reception (the forming of a subject as a viewer linked to the experience of the seeing of an exhibition). Those two moments are not integrated into a linear reasoning as in the argument. Indeed, it is not the case here that anticipation comes before and is used as a premise, and it is not the case that reception is used as a conclusion : the form of reasoning does not suppose moving from the first to the second and fixing the gap in between. Instead, If it’s conceivable it’s possible takes each moment and displaces it. Taken from the past, the moment of anticipation (or forming of desires, visions, thoughts) becomes a possible narrative, where desires or expectations shape di erent possible situations. Taken from the future, the moment of reception (or presentation, exhibition, audience) becomes the projection of such possible situation in the form of an unveiling. Together, those two moments join in the narrative node that is the viewer.

Therefore, the bridging of those two narratives inside the WallRiss purports to show the cognitive gap, much like the one in the conceivability argument. However, although the structure is maintained, the linearity of the logical argument does not take place ; precisely because the two border moments are displaced and hence cannot operate as steps, the logical structure operates only as a landmark, not as a rational constraint. Here, memory comes from the future and anticipation comes from the past : it is then predictive memory that is staged in the art space. Taken as a hole, the exhibition makes such memory possible by the process of recollection, of putting the pieces of reasoning together, going against a linear form of experiencing a structure. Expectation and reception are not the central narratives but instead become part of a transitional process that is the core of If it’s Conceivable it’s Possible. Then, instead of the inference as a bridge like in the argument with which we began, it is here a transference that is taking place : a collapse of narratives.