Le Grand Trampolage
A Minecraft Exhibition
An Outlook, The Mythical Institution
07–12–2019
Exhibition Note by Arootin Mirzakhani

an outlook, 2019

Museums of natural history and botanical gardens cover the assemblage nature offers, specifically of the dead and the primitive. Precisely situated in space, yet somewhere displaced in time, the Mythical Institution embodies the enigma of contemporary art and its gallery ‘an outlook’ is the perfect recollection of such controversy. Five artressess* and three artists are on site to diligently stand in its current show ‘Le Grand Trampolage’. Artress Theresa Büchner plants trees from another dimension amidst the exhibition. In parapsychological terms this instance can be perceived as an apport: a fetched object from another realm, in very modest words one might say displacement. This form of engagement chosen by the apporteur reveals the inherent macht of the homo, in its simplification and not in its abstraction. As the tree reaches for heaven you will find light. Philip Ullman’s citation of the divine and the fertile interrogates the complicity of both faith and mortality. Ullman decodes the beam of light christianity imposed on the homo sapiens into a flickering exchange between light and dark. Within this network of dependencies artress Melanie Bonajo enters the fauna into the equation. Bonajo invokes a strategy of proxy-incarnation while rehabilitating the walls with beasts of extinct and extant derivation.

Theresa Büchner, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

Melanie Bonjao, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

This sense of evanescence contributes to the political and socio-economical mythology of the art; on the one side of the spectrum you have the living, on the other side you have the dead. Inside of this spectrum you will find a gradient of worldly machination and outside of this spectrum is where our disability to infiltrate abuts, a mark in which artress Lola Mae assumes position: a giant heart made of glass incorporated in the infrastructure reveals the bare soil, exposing the framework that consolidates origin and terminus of the work of art. Having developed an approach similar to Chloe Lucroixe’s infamously distinguished practice called la pratique de la tache aveugle (transl. blind spotting) allows the artress to stagger the performativity of art environments. Alluding to lacyness through the art of paper cutting artress Sonja Yakovleva displays sexy undergarments within sight, a sight where our gaze has no aim yet sees through. In contrast Robert Yang’s work celebrates the absence of underwear. A shot of phallic warfare sucked into life, only as long as one is not seen. In Mila Slominsky’s work a momentum of vulvic guardianship manifests into primordial fluidity while asking the question at hand: do we command or demand novelty? Stefan Cantante does neither, he remands. Like an It-bag his mosaic wall carries itself into a pattern of oblivion and still persuades you into buying it.

Lola Mae, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

Mila Slominsky, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

Stefan Cantante, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

‘Le Grand Trampolage’, as the name already suggests, invites you to a sanctuary of past and post-mythological sentiments. Its elusive yet sublime elaboration by eight temporalities closely intertwines a communal commitment to a virtual space. The virility of flora and fauna colligated with the political agency of queer-feminist practices situated in an institution carries a futurity that is morphed into a complex argument. The psychology of Minecraft is conspicuous; endless resources become an embrace to disregard the surreality of itself. ‘Le Grand Trampolage’ is an abstraction of the avatarian era of art production in which endlessness and amenability become a whimsical-utopian project.

*artress is a neologism by the author

Philip Ullman, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

Sonja Yakovleva, 2019, installation view, an outlook, Minecraft. Courtesy: the artist

Le Grand Tramolage
1 December 2019 – 12 January 2020
curated by Jan Berger
artists
Melanie Bonajo, Theresa Büchner, Stefan Cantante, Lola Mae, Mila Slominsky, Philip Ullman, Sonja Yakovleva and Robert Yang

An Outlook – The Mythical Institution
RSVP: office@mythical-institution.org
Please enclose your Minecraft username in your reservation.
You will need the current Java Version of Minecraft to be able to visit the exhibition venue.