Penumbra / Group Exhibition
︎ curated by Wendy Fredricksson
Io Makandal, Underbelly (?) | Penumbra
Group Exhibition at The Old Granary, Cape Town.
13.12.18 – 20.12.18
Underbelly (?), comissioned for Penumbra: Investigating the raw materials, symbolic participation and synthesis of relational realities, a group show curated by Wendy Fredricksson at the Old Granary, Cape Town.
The concepts of validity and reality operate simultaneously within internal landscapes of personal ideology and external communal spaces, which increasingly become interlinked through networks of virtual sociality while at times remaining synthetically calibrated due to the control we and others are able to yield over our output.
This exhibition explores the vast scope that this interrelation opens up to the way that perceptions of reality coexist and are mediated. The study of Relational Realities in various fields posits that space, objects and organisms are linked in ways that can alter their properties in response to reality, in its entirety, being in a constant state of flux. There are several branches of varying repute that posit theories in this line of thinking, such as quantum mechanics, cosmology and biology. In a social line of enquiry the network effect of human behaviour is of interest and provides a useful starting point for looking at the intersection of material and virtual realities of human culture. Language, bodies, histories, images, values and ideals are transposed through a myriad of channels into a multi-layered social reality.
Questions of genuine connection, the relation of the body to forms of knowledge and the shelf life of memory can be related to this enquiry. Can a feeling of validity momentarily operate with as much power as culturally accepted and institutionalised validity? Does the refutal of validity operate as freely as it’s dissemination can occur? Internal, public, virtual and historical projections are overlaid. Grey areas appear, there is a penumbra between the shadow and the light.