Curated by Jacob Proctor

• 15.09.–14.10.2017

Galerie Martin Janda is part of curated by_vienna 2017. Mistaking the Moon for a Ball, curated by Jacob Proctor, is featuring works by Matthew Brannon, Alejandro Cesarco, Jakob Kolding, Roman Ondak, Lisa Oppenheim and Kathrin Sonntag.

“Just as a child learns to grasp by stretching out his hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on presently still utopian goals as on goals within reach.” (Walter Benjamin)

In describing humanity’s attempt to negotiate the shift from one technological regime to another, Walter Benjamin employed the image of a child learning to grasp by stretching out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball. Taking this metaphor as a starting point, the exhibition focuses on artworks in which the slippage between recognition and misrecognition, translation and mistranslation between language and vision can give rise to new creative and transformative energies.

Not all such transformations are as momentous as those associated with the advent of modernity. Even such world-changing developments as the spread of the internet and neoliberal economic policies have seemed to insinuate themselves more gradually, only becoming fully apparent once they have already become ubiquitous. While many contemporary artists have chosen to address (and to resist) such changes head-on, others have opted for more oblique strategies invoking language, literature, and their intersection with the visible world. In this, they reflect something of the innocent child invoked by Benjamin’s metaphor, while poetically reimagining fundamental parameters of visual-linguistic experience.

Opening the exhibition, Matthew Brannon presents a stylized version of the signage one might expect in a used or antiquarian bookstore, where typical subject headings are juxtaposed with more idiosyncratic groupings based on aesthetic or intellectual affinity. Arranged with no identifiable logic, Brannon ultimately charts not a physical space but a mental one, a schema onto which each viewer will inevitably map the coordinates of his or her own literary and intellectual formation. Two photographs by Alejandro Cesarco frame different perspectives of the same introductory wall text for a (fictional) Ruscha retrospective based chiefly around ideas of banality and boredom. In Jakob Kolding’s work, collage has long served to weave together dialects as divergent as hip hop and sociology, dance music and dada. In recent years, the artist has increasingly turned toward literature and theater, but while actual text is often absent from these works, the problems of language are as present as ever. Lisa Oppenheim’s two-channel film Cathay (2010) creates a complex visual-textual conversation highlighting the productive potential in the inconsistencies in meaning that necessarily result from any exercise in translation. Likewise, Kathrin Sonntag gives pictorial expression to slips of the tongue, where absurdist transpositions open the way for new understandings of familiar sayings. Finally, Roman Ondak’s Interview (2005) asks us to question any number of situations where scripted dialogue has supplanted any semblance of true personal communication.

Text: Jacob Proctor