PORTFOLIO
Statement
Situated in the horizons opened by sculpture as a perspective to making art in the contemporary world, my work combines religious aesthetics, illness, hospitals, scientific worlds, and the integration of digital methods into sculpture. Seeing things through the canon of sculpture suggests a form to my ideas and aids in navigating the field of art and its making, pointing out the possible and the impossible. It forces me to ask myself questions such as: how can I convey motion in, or encode a narrative to a fixed form? How do materialities become culturally signifying? Would anyone put this in their living room?
I’ve created an art theoretical concept, experimental body to explain the object of my practice. Art is interested in the potentials of the body as discovered by science, contributing to shaping our understanding of what it is to be a corporeal creature. However, the potential of our biology faces cultural resistance: our genome could be different, but it must remain intact, ’natural. Hence, the experimental body is always schizophrenic – it
produces realities that are logically impossible to reconcile. Such contradictions include the ideas of the unity of the body (e.g. ancient psychophysical beauty and the ’spiritual body’ of Christianity) and of its essence, and their clash with medical and biological interpretation: the body is a field in which a variety of agency intersects ni unpredictable ways, from tens of trillions of human cells to an even greater number of bacterial cells and viruses. The body is full of life, processes and potentials that seem difficult to comprehend or narrativize. The psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s term ’object’ further opens up this contradiction: we experience horror when we encounter our own materiality. An open wound or stool breaks cultural meaning – the boundary between inside and outside.
In my art, I draw on and explore the aesthetic unconscious. Images and scenes that have power, occur to me, and to understand them I have to think backwards: where do these images come from? Why do they evoke emotions? While the process is subjective, there is also an external order to it: this is because visual communication is a language, and languages are shared. The visual unconscious is shaped by modes and conventions of representation, often involving social and political issues.
Experimental systems mix up elements that might be thought of as analytically separate or distinct. They are not necessarily well defined, or provide clear answers. Yet, they set up situations where new kinds of interactions and patterns can take place and be observed. My practice resembles a kind of experimentation with material signs and visual languages. The works produce symbolic interactions that articulate the world itself differently, with new affective tones and connotations.
eliaslangi.com 