Obelus, Berlin
May 11 - June 23 2024
press release & works list
Mea, Precious Angel: Provocations Toward a Moudlarity of the Abyss - companion text to Until This I Mean This
Contemporary Art Library
Photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza
Until This I Mean This is essentially a collection of ornaments. Functioning as edges, doodles, sketches, traces of a journey of flight—or perhaps, of landing—five cryptic drawings decorate the main exhibition space, imagined as a lovers bedroom (un’ alcòva in Italian) where the intimacy of pillows has expanded, their feathers exploded and taken over the entire floor. Above the bedpost, light comes in through a window stained with film stills extracted from footage of a mouth pronouncing the word ‘Loss’. Mysterious clusters of words ornate and block the electrical outlets on the walls.
Mea, Precious Angel: Provocations toward a Modularity of the Abyss, the companion text to the show, is the journey Until This I Mean This refers to. An experiment in falling disguised as an attempt to fly, the text starts out drawing on the notion of the erotic articulated by Audre Lorde in her seminal 1978 speech Uses of the Erotic, to eventually develop into a psychotic monologue by angel Mea Dow introducing ‘the limic:’ a further, undefining feeling of deep erotism.
Limic feeling pervades a kind of extreme indulgence in the lush and rampant space—the limit—flourishing between two whose individuation and identification are suspended. In the narrative, identification and identity are understood in connection to their shared Latin root, idem, meaning 'sameness', standing in contrast to the unbridled diversity of experience. The text weaves together a tapestry of references from academic sources to poetry and literature, eventually linking the logic of the limit to the concept of ‘the alcove’, sketched to trace back objectification to the intimate, (I)ndividual realm of daily life. Mea's conclusion is unforgiving: that dimension whereby the unknown is casted into nothingness—the abyss—is modular, that is, essentially a-semantic: it originates within a hyper-specific, subjectual intimacy antecedent and posterior to discoursive categories such as sexuality, religion, gender, race, or economic class. The text playfully experiments in style with a contemporary reimagination of the “pasquinata” , a public and provocative mode of institutional critique original of early medieval Rome.
— exhibition text authored by the artist
2024
24 laser prints on vinyl, window panes, window frame
118 x 217 cm
2024
laser print on vinyl, archival laser print on embossed bamboo paper, alizarin powder, silk
40 x 50 cm
2024
laser print on vinyl, archival laser print on embossed bamboo paper, alizarin powder, silk
40 x 50 cm
2024
single channel Ultra HD digital video file
33 minutes, 36 seconds
2024
single channel Ultra HD digital video file
33 minutes, 36 seconds
2024
single channel Ultra HD digital video file
33 minutes, 36 seconds