11th Gwangju Biennale
2. 9. – 6. 11. 2016
Korea

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Andreasen04.jpg

Søren Andreasen

An etching composed of horizontal lines, equivalent to a scanned image, generating a gaseous formation with no apparent cause or purpose. A black and white photograph framing a section of a rock slide, blown up and shot using a shallow focus to assimilate the suggestive effect of a cinematic image.
Søren Andreasen's (b. 1964, Copenhagen) series Towards a Lightness of Mind and Matter comprises various kinds of prints: woodcuts, etching, digital photography, scanned drawings, and a text, “Mass and Order 2,” which is also published in collaboration with The Book Society, Seoul, as part of his GB11 project.

The series renders fleeting effects and synthetic entities that evoke the non-human strata of plasma, photons, and dark matter within an atmosphere of human technology and cultural production. In this way, Andreasen draws attention to the non-human aspects of reality that the human nervous system translates into comprehensible messages and information; a process of mediation, however, that also prevents us from experiencing something else than the human-made world.

In general, the work of Søren Andreasen offers a speculative yet radical questioning of representation that is often staged in the gray zone of distinction between the human and the non-human. Like someone contemplating a fossilized fern plant or imagining the qualities of an extraterrestrial life form, Andreasen approaches the elementary procedures of traditional graphic techniques and digital imaging technologies as a visual and conceptual vocabulary for contemplating the limits of human understanding.

The title of the series, Towards a Lightness of Mind and Matter, frames the selection of prints within a thought experiment; what if the world as it appears to us is not a certainty, a fact, but rather an effect of probability within a multitude of possible worlds? For Andreasen, the experience of lightness simultaneously signifies an ease of mind, just as it refers to a lack of substance, and he proposes that the experience of lightness dissolves the significance of the world as it appears, increasing the probability of worlds to come as a consequence. This is, as Italo Calvino wrote in an essay on Charles Fourier, a utopia of fine dust, corpuscular, and in suspension. AM

self-presentation:

An Inuit figurine. 1955. Stands on a plinth and looks like a demon. Non-human. According to the man who keeps it, the figure represents the kind of person who does not contribute to maintaining a community. L’Indifférent. 1717. A painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Quite small. 25 x 19 centimeters. A shy young man posing in a park. In the twilight. Wearing dancing shoes and dressed in silk. Glistening and floating. What Should We Do With Our Brain? 2004. A book by Catherine Malabou. A critique of neural ideology and a progressive reading of neuroplasticity. A call for a new consciousness of the brain. And a projection of a new, neuronal self constructed in relation to one’s brain as an image of a world to come.