“LOOP #3”. Non-places in art (video installation)
2015

MATOSEK / NIEZGODA, a studio which specializes in design of exhibition spaces, invited me to cooperate. It resulted in the exhibition „LOOP 3”, non-places in art in the space they adopted for various artistic activities #POLIGON (#Poligon Art Space). It was 150 square meters of a deserted apartment located on Nowogrodzka Street in the center of Warsaw.

My installation „LOOP 3” consisted of three components and annexed three rooms: a kitchen, a living room and a room, and the whole exhibition referred to the theory of non-places by Mark Augé.

A non-place is a specific space and people have no emotional and relational involvement with them.

The „LOOP 3” site-specific installation is dedicated to #POLIGON, this non-place that first was a flat and then became non-flat.

Previously, it was the space with which people entered into personal relationships, and now it has become a „non” and „ownerless” space. Emotional and meaningful aspects of all rooms have been re-evaluated.

Exhibitions:

„LOOP #3”, #POLIGON, Warsaw, Poland, 2015

The first non-place: The Kitchen.

One of the aims of the „LOOP 3” installation was to draw attention to what is thrown away, seemingly meaningless things, waste, residues of organic matter. That is why fish leftovers appeared in the video installation.

They were represented by a projection of a looped, meditative video. The video was displayed on a table made of food wrap. Its proportions were in line with a traditional Japanese tea table.

The Japanese context did not appear by chance, because this culture is associated with rituals, mindfulness, attention to detail and celebration of seemingly ordinary and meaningless things like brewing tea.

All these leads – the fish leftovers, the food wrap, the table – emphasized the „alimentary” character of the for

The second Non-Place: The Living Room.

The second non-place was the living room as part of the most „social” space in a apartment or house, to which guests are usually invited, so the human factor, the social aspect, was exposed.

Due to the physical division of the living room into two parts, a rear projection screen made of beef intestine was placed in the passage between them.

Access to a smaller part of the room was cut off because the video was being displayed there. They consisted of over a dozen superimposed records from non-places, i.e. places of daily without any emotional value. Among them was a a underground parking, parking meter, ATM or a dustbin on the sidewalk.

During the projection in intervals (video – pause – video – pause etc.) there was a computer-generated intentional „error”. It was a kind of „hacking” the idea of social trust that humanity has for the infallibility of the computer, or more broadly – of machines.
The small intestines act as a natural filter – they absorb valuable and nutritious substances, and remove toxic ones. That is why the projection screen made of the small beef intestine was a filter: it filtered the existing artistic situation.

On one side of the screen – the filter – were people in the former apartment (i.e. a temporary non-place, temporarily adapted for the needs of the exhibition space, a quasi-art gallery), and on the other – a record of overlapping other non-places was shown.

The screen – the filter – was a conventional wall between the individual and the external situation, exploring important places that are meaningless, and unimportant places, which are given too much significance. And sometimes we are stuck in such wrong reasoning, mental pattern, looping, losing insight on what is really worth attention and what is not.

The third non-place: The Room.

Not all non-places in art as places of artistic activities must be social.

In the room as a space – compared to the kitchen or the living room – the most inbred, intimate, inaccessible to others space was a video installation, which consisted of three identical monitors.

Suspending them at the knee height forced the viewers to take uncomfortable position and look down. Thus, they were forced to look differently, to look at the reality in a different way, and giving meaning to meaningless things.

The installation consisted of three animations with fish after filleting shown on the monitors. In place of organs, it had a gel dressing that created the most ideal wound healing environment.

In this way, the animation showed three different stages of convalescence – from complete immobility, immobilization, to high activity.

This could be literally understood as the vivification – thanks to the right conditions it was possible to bring the fish to life, but also metaphorical, as the vivification by giving meaning again.