2 June - 6 June 2010
Opening and reading: Wednesday, 2 June, 7 pm
Conversation: Sunday, 6 June 5pm
And while he watched himself, he imagined other birds looking at him, and imagined he was one of them watching him. With each performance, the bird understood a little more about his representation. He thought, “If others can understand me through the presentation of myself, then, whether conscious of it or not, I must always be performing.”
Becoming Real: A Magpie’s Recognition of Self is an exhibition by artist and writer Anthony Marcellini centered on a text he has written investigating the relationship between an individual's self-awareness and their role in society through the perspective of an inquisitive bird.
This text, or more correctly fable, was influenced by the artist’s experience of the European Magpie (Latin pica pica) a bird found all over the city of Gothenburg, Sweden where he recently moved. These birds, which immediately stood out to him due to their mischievous, curious nature and highly developed social structures, are one of the only birds (and one of few mammals) capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror. Connecting the mirror awareness of the magpie to Jacques Lacan’s notion of mirror self-recognition and further to theories of self-awareness, performativity, and social engagement, the text presents an imaginative tale of a Magpies coming into being.
This short exhibition will feature a series of drawings of Magpies in moments of contemplation and a sculpture of a taxidermied Swedish Magpie staring at its own reflection in a mirror. It will be accompanied by a reading from the text on Wednesday, 2 June and a conversation with Marcel Tomášek on Sunday, 6 June.
Anthony Marcellini is an artist and writer. His practice is based around examining the politics of the creative act. He is especially interested in words, gestures and actions, which expand our understanding of freedom and redefine our human behavior. He received his MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts in 2009. In 2008 he was a recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant and the Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Arts. In February 2010 he was an artist in residence at Sparwasser HQ in Berlin. And he recently received a Projektstöd Pronto Grant from Göteborgs Stads kulturförvaltning/Kulturstöd to produce the public project Towards a Boundless World: Backa Stand Up Comedy in the fall in Sweden. Currently he is teaching at Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden. For more information visit www.anthonymarcellini.info.
Marcel Tomášek - czech sociologist, political scientist, graduated from the Philosophical Faculty of Palacky University, works at Department of Sociology, Masaryk University Brno
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