The What If?… Scenario (after LG) | Cerith Wyn Evans

In The What If?… Scenario (after LG), Wyn Evans literally sets the stage for a multitude of potentialities, contingencies, and uncertainties about given conditions and structures of what we see and what we know and how we come to know without ever solidifying his position into a positivist affirmation but rather remaining suspended in “weak connections”.

His luminous works, collected by TBA21 over 10 years and here shown together for the first time, unfold a spider web of artistic, literary, and referential signifiers, waiting to be glimpsed and grasped by a viewer who cannot but become an active performer in a play of multiple meanings and speculations. Wyn Evans’s artistic strategy interrupts our habitual access to the world of objects and meanings by disrupting our associative and (re-)cognitive patterns, locating gaps, hinting at subliminal associations, anecdotal slippages, contingencies, and errors in translation.

Cerith Wyn Evans, however, uses almost exclusively the “already written”, stages it as event, “queers it”, displaces it and makes it truly contingent. Working mostly with film, light, communication technologies such as Morse code, literature, and quotations, he complicates the materiality and structural aspects of coded communication and text at the threshold of installation.

Exploring and exploiting the limits of vision, the reticence of the retina, and structural cinematic experiences, he plays with the viewers’ psychophysical condition, approaching his or her sensorium in multiple audiovisual languages that are waiting to be translated, decoded, and interpreted within an open horizon of meanings without ever fully losing control of the frame of interpretations.

Duration: July 5 – November 3, 2013
Location: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria

more. www.tba21.org