April – May 2009
Michael Gimenez and Anders Grønlien have been working together for several years. Their last three exhibitions (AVU, Meet Factory and Entrance Gallery) are interrelated, and the installation in etc. gallery follows on from them It concerns a frame project in which the authors place gallery spaces as well as their curators in the role of media. They treat space as a characteristic material, transform it and create installations evoking an atmosphere of déjà vu. The visitor has experienced something similar before – not the actual installations, although they give us a sensation we have felt before when drawn into an intensive visual perception, so easily accessible through the genre of film. It is a mix of reality and fiction searching the boundaries of a work of art, or experiencing zero gravity while floating through space (AVU installation 2008). The motives of individual semantic elements are close to the essential moments and icons of cult sci-fi films (Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey). The subtleness of the artistic work is propped up by its formal perfection. In the case of the Illuminated Hideout 4.0 - the Quarantine project in etc. gallery, the authors consulted with Brian Wade, the famous special effects make-up artist, coincidentally living in Prague. The result is a horror photograph of an alien (a derivate of the gallery curators) which has seized the etc. gallery. Other elements of the installation semantically refer to the 1950s American film noir Kiss Me Deadly. The authors chose the irregular shape of the exhibition space itself as a module for their installations, which they multiply in the form of proportionally diminishing boxes, one of which is specifically related to the moment of all-absorbing light. A mystical atmosphere on the verges of reality and film scenography: the gallery is transformed into a mise-en-scène.
Markéta Vinglerová, 2009
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