Artist: Jura Shust
Exhibition title: Absorption
Curated by: Aleksei Borisionok
Venue: Gallery Ў, Minsk, Belarus
Date: March 16 – April 7, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gallery Ў
The artist is drinking water from a fountain in the fading shopping centre. At the centre of the architectural ensemble, constructed in a futuristic vein, there is a fountain which continues to pulse the living matter through the channels of a complex system, maintaining its hibernation. Referring to the widespread comparison of water and information, the artist connects his body with this ramified system, recreating a kind of ritual of inclusion in the thinking shell of the noosphere. Further, the work refers to the myth of Narcissus, the dissolution in the reflection or copy which is an important phenomenon of modern culture. The conceptual finale is outside of the scope of video work – the ingesting of the antidote – 11 tablets of activated charcoal, to prevent physical and informational intoxication.
Today, information is often described using metaphors of liquidity – information shower, the flow of information, information leakage. Information, as well as water, is a dynamic resource, constantly changing, with no stable shape, flowing through modern structures of stabilisation and control. These same metaphors can be applied to the surface of contemporary culture, where information is being accelerated and merged into one bodily-cognitive sphere.
The graphic language of the work is based on the junction between myth and fact, esoteric iconography and scientific infographics – kind of a rebus with no final solution. The diagram refers to scientific research in the field of elementary particles, mythological tropes and the everyday of late capitalist culture. А projection into the future, an increasing speed of communication and information intoxication, technological and mythological utopianism, framing the belief in immortality – one of the main themes of this exhibition.
