MAC 2018: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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.