Midnight Sun

17.11. 2016 –  15.01. 2017

with

Jofroi Amaral
Peter Vink

 Curated by Jung Me Chai

What is the midnight sun? You might know it without having seeing it. Is it day or is it night? Can we trust our eyes? Only for one day at the poles, in the midnight sun is glowing for 24 hours, misleading the usual perception of time for there is no difference between night and day. The question of seeing is always related to where you position yourself in the space. Navigating freely is almost impossible. We are all, always, conditioned by the world surrounding us.

Belgian artist Jofroi Amaral and Dutch artist Peter Vink both deal with detouring our perception of space and of the object that we are looking at. Intervening directly and physically into the gallery space, Vink challenges the limits between architecture and body expression. His site specific installation, which carries the name of the space, Diskurs 2016, is a work about the invisible structures that we don’t always perceive, but that are yet there. Taking as construction lines the actual traces on the façade of Novalisstrasse 7, Vink bring them inside the gallery space, pushing the visitors to physically confront themselves with them. On the other hand, Amaral’s practice plays with our preconceptions of the represented and the representable. Amaral sees painting as an act of exploration and creation, which is not only related to the action of painting itself. The communication passes through the canvas, but moreover despite the canvas; through the object but also beyond the object itself. For this exhibition’s project, Amaral presents three pieces: a painting, a sculptural object and a drawing. These elements, although conceived independently, structure the room asymmetrically, silently interrogating the viewers about their semantic relationship. The exhibition Midnight Sun aims to explore constrictions in movements and constrictions in the process of creating meaning.