Norbert Costin & Marika Troili: Reconstruction

Opening: Saturday February 24, 17:00-21:00
Open February 24 – April 1, 2018

 

The word transparency is a junction of the Latin words trans and parere. Trans means “on the other side of” and parere means to “consider, act or appear”. The roots of transparency lead us to medieval scholastic theology and describes the visual or aesthetic characteristics of eternal souls. The manifestations of a blessed clarity or translucent remained in the early and later modern Europe. It has played an important role in the construction of a (dream)state of total individual and social visibility. We find traces of this dream of total transparency in today’s debates on surveillance and privacy, but also in the demand for transparency in politics and business. The “good company” is transparent and has nothing to hide. The good citizen illuminates its body and its actions by its own will.

In the exhibition Reconstruction, the artists Norbert Costin & Marika Troili explore aspects and perceptions of transparency based on conceptual as well as formal and material points of departure. Since they became acquainted in 2011, Costin and Troili have had ongoing dialogues and artistic exchanges. Their first exhibition together, ibid. was shown in Targu Mures, Romania, in spring 2017. The abbreviation ibid. means verbatim in the same place and is often used in textual form to avoid repetitions, the same reference for example. Their second exhibition, Reconstruction, is an exhibition in its own right, but can at the same time be regarded as a precursor to the artists’ first collective exhibition. The word reconstruction is within the business sector synonymous with the term bankruptcy but is also used in the sense of recreating and repeating a previous event. The exhibition Reconstruction explore our preconceptions and expectations of transparency and is as much about what is visible as what is not.

Curators: Sebastian Dahlqvist and Louise Waite.

The exhibition Reconstruction is presented with additional support from the Romanian Cultural Institute.