We Are Not Ourselves

Site-specific installation, video, performance

Exhibition For/In Itself

Curated by Olga Tarasova

Chalton Gallery, 96 Chalton St, Somers Town, London, NW1 1HJ

14th February - 1st of March 2020

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Our eyes, ears, hands and organs are the entities that exist within the world, databanks that are responsible for supplying information. They are part of a fleshy network that creates cognition, but we cannot be sure if they retain their own cognitive power. It is this uncertain distribution that shifts perceptive agency into the perceived object. Subject and object mutate in and out of each other. The subject becomes stocked with power when an individual moment collides with reconstructed sensations. These sensations can take on an unnatural aspect, becoming unsettling and giving us the feeling that there is something lurking just out of view waiting to make itself known. This dissolution and reconfiguration of perception as multifaceted, rather than tethered to a fixed single point, opens up peripheral spaces and alternative systems made known to us through the fuzzy cognisance of the fleshy networks.

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FOR/IN ITSELF reflects on the interrelation of sense, space and perception within artistic practices. Addressing the capability of the world to represent itself without being completely explicit, treating experience as an open totality of inexhaustible synthesis. The exhibition explores the experience of an I, not in the sense of an absolute subjectivity, but one that is being invisibly demolished and transformed. FOR/IN ITSELF abandons the concept of ‘the single space’ and attempts to coalesce objectivity through resuming the contact with the sensorial.

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For the exhibition artists Matilda Moors and Svetlana Ochkovskaya imagine the gallery space as a creature, morphing it into a body. Moors addresses the idea of being drawn in, shifting from surface to innards. She takes the mouth as a starting point, abstracting it into fragmented parts that are reassembled within the confines of the gallery walls. While Ochkovskaya breaks down the everyday experience of the space and creates a disorientated environment in order to move away from our usual atomised perception of the world. This is played out through her installations which are inhabited with an inhuman creature that comes to life in her performances.

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