Tearing
forster + gemini, Berlin, DE
November 11, 2023—January 21, 2024
Exhibition and performance including synthesized tears, cotton paper, polymer sheeting, polyvinyl chloride, brass, custom alizarin pigment, cotton paper, plywood, vellum et. al., 30m sound mix.
excerpt from the exhibition text by Dave Walker:
In Tearing, Ciarrocca operates within the chasms that relationships lay bare by working through the concept and subsets of the act of acquiring. He resurrects philosophical concerns around our patterns of belonging, auth-enticating and relating by exposing, probing and relegating their normative conditions. The show touches upon personal bindings conceived and materialized through a body of sculptures, their erased histories, illegible marking and humming futures working to bypass the circuitry of Representation. A contract com/im-posed by the artist lays out desirous relations, leaving viewers to trade in their individuation with dividuation.
By crossing the threshold to the room hosting the show, the contract comes into effect. Its 'ungoverned' force acts upon the presence of and the confrontation with those who are here to see. The passage thus marks one such circumstance out of many; one pimple on the "white-hot, labyrinthine and aleatory" band that is this Libidinal Economy. A band reminiscent of the polymer flooring some works will be seen laying on, their placements ambiguously signaling as burials or sun-tanning stances, surrounded by slowly drying liquid, which, we learn, shares the same chemical composition with our own tears. Once through the threshold, one is being navigated through a domain populated by sculptures whose initial surfaces (hence histories) were previously abraded and 'zeroed' by the artist. Every one of them was then marked individually in collision or encounters with other surfaces and materials, and, predominantly, by the simple and surprising gesture of hand-holding: in couple while reading the poem Ossuary I by Dionne Brand, in the case of 5, or in the case of 4, while sleeping.
tearing: interrogations
Dave Walker and Clemente Ciarrocca
