RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
UNSTABLE PRESENCE
May 24 - September 9, 2018,
The Musée d’art
contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is hosting an exhibition by the Montreal-based and internationally-acclaimed artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It is his largest solo show in Canada or the United States. It provides an unusual and a unique museum experience where the visitor participation and interaction with the exhibited pieces is necessary for the full functionality of the art work. Those participating will in effect become a part of the works since they are needed to reveal the installations' underlying central concept.
Unstable Presence is a major survey of
Lozano-Hemmer’s work over the past 18 years. It brings together 21 pieces,
including several large-scale immersive installations. In his work,
Lozano-Hemmer draws on science, technology, politics, sociology, poetry, music
and art history, while engaging the public in a conversation
Born in Mexico, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as a conceptual artist, is a leading international figure in
participatory and digital-media practices. He is known on the art world
stage where his work is regularly shown in the most prestigious institutions.
During the 1990s, he began exploring the performance and interaction potential of his works, in particular, the merging of various artistic disciplines with technology, which he described as the language of our time, basic and inevitable.
The participatory and
technological aspects of Lozano-Hemmer’s works are based on co-presence, where live and recorded data overlap. Through the use of
microphones, face-recognition algorithms, biometric scanners and computerized
surveillance, artworks interact with the visitors in performances that could be perceived as both playful and intimate, but where the technology underlying the
interaction often echoes more troubling social, economic and political
dynamics.
Showing how we interact
with technology and making the internal mechanisms of devices visible is one of
the strategies deployed in Lozano-Hemmer’s works. As one walks through the
exhibition, the physical presence of the works and their sculptural occupation
of space, makes the invisible digital world on which they are based quite factually present. This concept overpowers the visitors right in the Museum's entry hall, where the impressive Pulse
Spiral (2008), is displayed. 300 light bulbs and kilometres of electrical wire are configured to
reproduce, through light, the beating hearts of the Museum’s visitors. The evanescent spiral of lights swill betrays the fascination with seeing one’s heartbeat, and the way it eventually merges with the recordings of the previous 299 participants.
For music lovers, there is Sphere Packing:
Bach (2018, a new work by the artist presented for
the very first time), and Sphere
Packing: Wagner (2013). These installations are two in a
series of 17 works that concentrate the entire musical production of a composer
into a single multi-channel sphere. The black-glazed porcelain sphere dedicated
to Richard Wagner (13 centimetres comprising 110 channels of sound) hangs
from the ceiling and visitors have to bring their ear up close in order to hear
the individual compositions. The far more prolific composer, Johann Sebastian
Bach, required 1,128 individual speakers distributed through a 3-metre sphere
that visitors may physically enter and thus immerse themselves in the totality
of the Baroque composer’s opuses, played simultaneously.
In Call on
Water (2016), the writings of celebrated Mexican poet
Octavio Paz, who was the artist’s uncle, are presented in a fountain that acts
as a poetry machine. The water is turned into cold vapour by ultrasonic
atomizers, which project the words into the air above the basin for a few
compelling instants. Contemplative and poetic, the work highlights the
materiality of language and converts it, as the poet would probably have
appreciated, into a breathable atmosphere.
In a whole different
register, one which engages with power relations and surveillance equipment, Zoom Pavilion (2015), made in collaboration with
Polish artist Krzysztof Wodizcko, is a room-sized interactive installation
where participants are surrounded by projected black-and-white images of faces
and bodies localized within the space. Twelve computerized surveillance cameras
track the presence of participants and, employing facial recognition combined
with background subtraction and machine-learning algorithms, record their
spatial relationships to one another. The piece makes evident the omnipresence
of surveillance cameras, but what is at stake is the tracking of public
assembly, and keeping an archive of how long and how far each visitor was from
each other.
Vicious
Circular Breathing (2013), is a large sculptural
installation evoking both a curious scientific device and a gigantic musical
wind instrument, similar to an organ. It consists of brown paper bags that
inflate and deflate at human breathing rates, a set of motorized bellows and
valves that control the bags, and a sealed glass room with a decompression
chamber. Visitors are invited to enter the glass chamber to breathe the air
that was previously breathed by earlier participants. Despite its amusing
musical allusions, the piece is disturbing and uncomfortable: it includes
warnings regarding the risks of asphyxiation, contagion and panic. Among other
interpretations, the piece is a statement on the limits of the planet’s
resources but also a commentary on the supposedly empowering culture of
participation, — in this piece your participation makes the air more
toxic for future visitors.
Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer is a recipient of the 2015 Governor General's
Awards for Visual and Media Arts.
In June 2016, he was named a Companion of the Ordre des
arts et des lettres du Québec by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
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For more information about MAC, visit the museum's website.
