BEYOND

BEYOND

A Multi Media Exhibition
28 June – 3 July

Private View: 29^th June, 2023, 18:00-21:00

Performance artists:

Music

Yiding
Chaney Diao
Samuel Barbier-Ficat

Art performance
Malu Laet
Zhuyang Leiu

In the realm where imagination weaves its intricate tapestry, where worlds are born from the whisper of minds, the established normative systems and mechanisms in our world are being re-imagined and re-articulated to offer new realities. We would like to call this “Fictioning”, as formulated by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan in their book by a similar title, that it alludes to “an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. It thereby strives to avoid becoming a mere simulation, parody, or simulacra of reality, but it departures from fixed identities and the exploration of potentialities, allowing for the creation of new modes of being.

Though they possess a shared impulse that is both disruptive and creative, these fictions can manifest in diverse forms and shapes, stemming from distinct origin; Fictioning is thus dividing by Burrows and O’Sullivan into three myth-functions – mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis.

“Mythopoesis to performance fictioning”,

“Myth-science to science fictioning”,

“Mythotechnesis to machine fictioning”.

We therefore approach the exhibition via these three separated yet interconnected concepts, unpacking the artworks and their abilities to offer us a new reality. Mythopoesis creates a myth, while myth-science combines mythological and scientific elements, and mythotechesis concerns the ways in which technology enters into discourse and life. Fictioning, overall, as a tool which offers us to address the possibilities, problematics and tensions between the residual and emergent cultures, the real-life norms and sci-fi, the organics and mechanics, and future human-machine relations and assemblages.

The context of the Crypt Gallery, helps us to unpack the initial concept further in a spatio-temporal sense. The space was used as an air shelter during the war in 1822, and was reopened as a gallery space in 2002. As a place in which different space-time relations were manifested throughout its existence, the Crypt acts as a fitting environment to meditate on the possible synchronous nature of time. Taking as a premise the idea of a non-linearity of time, with the past and future equally not fixed or determinate, we aim to explore the potential encounters that might happen between them — the thing enabled by the very idea of fictioning.

The exhibition seeks to delve into the concept of fictioning from two perspectives: its potential as a collective, critical voice challenging existing norms and as a transformative agency to encourage the audience to actively engage with new realities and facilitate individual connections to those seemingly impossible possibilities and construct their own new worlds. This is an interactive game, a simultaneous hilarity, a collective celebration that resonates beyond spatial-virtual boundaries, beyond linear temporalities, and beyond the reality that we situate our body and mind.

[1]  Burrows, David J, and Simon O’Sullivan. 2019. Fictioning : The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[2]  Burrows, David J, and Simon O’Sullivan. 2019. Fictioning : The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[3]  ‘Mythopoesis is proposed as productive of worlds, people and communities to come, often drawing upon residual and emergent cultures. Myth-science functions by producing alternate perspectives and models, revealing habits of thought concerning physical, historical and social realities as yet more myth. Lastly, mythotechnesis concerns the ways in which technology enters into discourse and life, through projections of the existing and future influence of machines.’ – Burrows, O’Sullivan, Fictioning, p. 1.