Artists: Cécile B. Evans, Daniel Jacoby & Yu Araki, Serafín Álvarez
Exhibition title: The Way Things Do
Curated by: Serafín Álvarez and Martina Millà
Venue: Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain
Date: June 30 – October 1, 2017
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Fundació Joan Miró
In 1987, the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss presented their film Der Lauf der Dinge, known internationally as The Way Things Go. The film shows the chain reaction of a long sequence of objects and substances that activate and connect with each other, as if they were predetermined by a continuous cause-and-effect relationship. The sequence, appearing as arbitrary and chaotic, is meticulously choreographed.
The 1980s were also the decade when Daniel Jacoby & Yu Araki, Serafín Álvarez and Cécile B. Evans were born. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Swiss duo’s film, these artists have used the piece as a basis for new productions.
The Way Things Do offers a perspective from which the artists explore the notion of the object as an independent, complex, inexhaustible reality. Their works reveal the background behind a traditional Japanese sport that is now only practiced on a single track in the world; they examine the relationships that fans develop with consumer objects from the realms of fiction, and they build a narrative in which humans, data, machines and artificial intelligence work together.
The exhibition ends with a screening of the original film by Fischli and Weiss.
With the collaboration of Hangar (Centre de producció i recerca d’arts visuals), BAR project and Arts Council Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
