‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
What are we waiting for? What awaits us?’
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Dirimart is pleased to announce Wingbeats, a group exhibition at a virtual and augmented reality art platform, Vortic. Featuring the works of Georgina Gratrix, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Jennifer Ipekel, Komet, Nasan Tur and O Zhang, the exhibition can be seen at the website of Vortic, vortic.art between 27 April and 26 May 2023.
Although vastly diverse in their practice, the artists of the exhibition unite in their exploration of colour, nature, and hope. In this exhibition, the audience finds herself in the middle of a room without a ceiling, as one can almost hear the Wingbeats of the birds flying above. The main space of the exhibition serves as a garden; from sunset to sunrise, with birds, flowers, and trees, the viewer is in confrontation with nature. Released from the anthropocentric world, nature is ruling the exhibition room. The exhibition challenges the audience not only by its context but through our physical competencies intrinsic to being human. A room that one cannot ever experience, smell or feel, but by means of technological apparatus, entering the transcendental world; entering the hyper-world. Today, rain is the only hope that we feed against aridification, so it’s better to unbuild the ceilings.
Hope is the only thing that we can think about, while the ever-growing effects and consequences of climate change are unstoppably crawling toward us. From the smaller exhibition room, a child stares her eyes upon us, however, one cannot clearly admit whether she is calling us to enter the room for help or blaming us. The viewer enters the room, with the feeling as if it belongs to that child: traces of a hand, a drawing of a house, and a little bird caged in the room. The sense of responsibility we feel for the child, in the ecological sense, and for nature itself reaches its highest point in this room. The virtual images of the harnessed and manipulated by the Anthropocene now become visible, touchable, and experienceable. The ceiling blocks the viewer to fly, holding the viewer in its hands, hypostatises the room as a cage. Nature now has dominance over humans.
Wingbeats attempts to remind us of our corporeality, and of the hope that flutters within us. ‘Hopelessness is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs,’ says Bloch. Determined by the future, as humans, we are obliged to bloom for a better future, with hope, not a utopia that only stays in a hyper world.
