8/3/2019 Haris Epaminonda Review
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Haris Epaminonda, VOL. IV
Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery, 29 May 30 August 2010
The large window of Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery looks like an
enigmatically empty vitrine these
days. On closer inspection, a sparse number of elements reveals
its subtle presence within this
showcase: a table with a thin white frame; a diminutive vase; a
small arched opening acting as aniche for another, near identical
vase.
It is one of the facets of Haris Epaminonda's new installation
VOL. VI, the latest instalment in a
series of meta-exhibitions titled as if they were tomes of an
encyclopaedia, of an opus magna, or
perhaps of a catalogue. These are in fact closely connected to
Epaminonda's long-term collaboration
with Daniel Gustav Cramer on The Infinite Library, an ongoing
series of books created by
extracting selected pages from ageing illustrated books and
binding them together, to form
completely new and seemingly haphazard correlations between
found images already imbued with
an abstract, often sculptural quality.
VOL. VIexpands this concept by making such plastic connections
constantly shift between thesecond and the third dimension, as a
number of framed book cut-outs is accompanied by african
statuettes and ceramic objects on plinths or glassless vitrines
and articulated in a labyrinthine
sequence of rooms. A low wooden barrier and a cluttered room
resembling a storage space complete
the environment. This arrangement of items is unmistakeably
meant to recreate a museum display,
particularly of the kind that one would expect to find in a
didactic exhibition of anthropological or
historical finds. Only here all information on the origins of
the exhibits and their reason for being
placed right there is withdrawn. It is as if most of the
exhibition had been deleted, whitened out
or, perhaps more aptly, omitted; or as if the space is being
experienced in an oneiric state, where
text is supposed to be there, but isn't.
Words and cyphers aren't completely absent, though. One of the
wall-hung book pages shows the
orphaned caption for a missing image; the description
frustratingly insist on observing elements of
the illustrated carpet - which isn't there. There is a carpet
printed on the verso, barely visible
through the page. There is also a real carpet, in a nearby room.
But as in a dream, objects evoked
from one's memory can look familiar and wrong at the same time.
The shape of the arched niche
visible from outside the gallery returns in one of the book
pages as a domestic window; turning the
corner, the same, real niche reappears as a void, with a view of
the outside world through the same
pane of glass that provided a first viewpoint into the
installation.
Page numbers are left on some of the book cut-outs, often
accompanied by their yellowed blank
margins. These aren't just mere illustrations: they are found
objects, subject to entropic processes ofmaterial degradation,
printed with ink on paper, with visible halftone dots resulting in
those unreal
colours capable of triggering a pre-conscious sense of
nostalgia. Moreover, while these pages are
presumably taken from illustrated catalogues or otherwise
factual, informative, scientific books,
their role here is rather to evoke through a systematic act of
data subtraction. In turn, this lack of
information generates a potentially infinite number of possible
associations: migrations of forms,
subjective projections, cultural assumptions and so forth.
This visual riddle is even replicated through the free booklet
distributed to the visitors like an
exhibition guide. But no guidance can be found in it only more
associations. The cover doesn't
even carry the artist's name. Just the back of ageisha's head,
like a faceless, mute sphinx whose
silhouette vaguely returns in the waterfall illustrated on the
back cover. Inside, between the laconicVI on the frontispiece and
the colophon, are two texts by the curators: a series of evocative
-but
entirely unrelated - autobiographicalFragments by Kathy Noble,
and a brief essay by Kyla
