Projects  
 

The Science of Confusion - installation 2012

Exhibition at MAKING. An International Conference on Materiality and Knowledge, University College in Telemark, Notodden, Norway
 
 
   

The purpose of the title, The Science of Confusion is to suggest that the room contains items and visual means, we can easily associate with science, while putting in doubt the science as truth provider. The room reflects an individual's attempt to understand, to make sense of the material world and the non-tangible inner world of thought, we humans are exposed to.

 
     
   

From left: Gicclé prints. Two high glass-vitrines exhibit the natural materials like seeds, plants, insects and other objects. To the right, there are portraits of flies framed in family-like frames. You can see portraits here. The monitor displays a video in 7 chapters. On this photography video chapter “The depth of death” is shown.

 
   

 
   

Collection of insects. Still Life staged on bread for purpose of macro photography. Some macro photo can you see here

 
   

 
    Collection of Seeds.  
   

 
    Exotic seeds and seed remains with Latin names,
under: an algae in symbiosis with a stone
.
 
   

 
    The Tree Which Never Grew. The Pure Form of Pain.  
     
    Dangerous Games. Punctum. Future was there. Now, only everlasting past.  
     
    These vitrines are specially made for the exhibition. Each vitrine has a shelf under the glass and interior LED lighting. They contain a collection of objects, photographs and text. Photographs over vitrines can you see here.  
   

 
   

Vitrine 1: This collection is a wonder of one of nature's "hidden codes" that visually manifest as bifurcation. Bifurcation is the term for a division into two, eg. branches and roots of trees and plants, rivers, veins, trachea etc. In this vitrine, from the left: satellite picture of the Himalayas, a young rhubarb leaf that has a texture of "mountains" and "valleys", bacterial colony, macro photography of China Ink, photography of deformed mountain-trees, China Ink drawing, X-ray of neck veins, dried roots of grass, a simplified model of the bifurcation, lichen, insect wing and a river Congo in Africa in a petri dish. How China Ink forms bifurcated forms are recorded in macro-video and in the video titled: The Secret of China Ink » shown on the exhibition. You can see it here.

Here is video which shows branches of bacterial colony.

 
     
   

The collection includes: A copy picture of Peter Campers drawing "Facial Angle" from 1770, (an innocent drawing from a lecture to art students about the beauty and portrait). Later, the picture has been used in connection with eugenics, beauty ideal and Nazi racism (Aryan race).
Under the picture there are four fruits Cucumis Africanus, systematized by size. Bigger = better - classification after look. Further, a collection of stamps. I inherited stamps from my father. The stamps are systematized in small packages and fastened with thin thread. It is my father who has packed this way.

To collect and care for, is something I associate with one of postwar "syndromes", but stamps also reminds me of the collections of assets of prisoners in concentration camps.
For example, in Auschwitz, there is a room with a "mountain" of shoes, "a mountain" of suitcases, "a mountain" of human hair. My father spent four years in a concentration camp during World War II. Further to the right there are a number of natural forms that resemble the heart (a fragment from tree roots), brain (walnut and pumpkin seeds). Heart and brain - the Cartesian dilemma of duality.

At the bottom right you will see a copy of the photograph of the Himmler and other Nazis, who picks flowers in a herb field in the concentration camp Dachau. To the right there is a sandwich with flies and other insects on - a feeling of disgust is captured. In the petri dish lies the satellite photography of Auschwitz - "The Pattern of Evil." Alongside the sandwich, there is a snapshot and "blowup" of a fragment from still image from video chapter, "The Vanishing Cementary of Forms". Underneath in the glass petri dish lies dead, dried insects and form a pattern.

 
   

 
   

"Heredity of perishing" - is the title of this vitrine. This is dedicated to a family semi-research. I have observed that my father in law, my husband and my son has the same type of eyes. By replacing father in law eyes with my son’s eyes, I could go back in time and infer how my father in law eyes looked like for 65 years ago, when he was 14. The poster I do not show on the web I call "Predicting the Past."
Top left, there is Christian pray book from approx. 1800s. There is an text under the book: "The Language Became a Form of Life". This composition is my materialized reflection on power, place, and control language has got. At the same time book and its words undergo the process of perishing as all matter does. To the right are there three dried leaves. I admire how decay process has transformed leaves to architectural forms. Although all leaves come from the same tree, they form the various visual forms of decay. Besides these, there is the old wrinkled beetroot. There is a postcard from 1937, from the sanatorium Piestany in Slovakia - a place to try to “prolong lives." The transparent  box in the bottom right corner, is filled with soil. In the middle of the soil there is a rectangular hollow shape as a reminder of an empty tomb, it's called "Prototype"

 
   

 
   

One of the light boxes. Behind the glass-plate lies thin dry Begonia Rex Escargot leaves. The public can study internal structures of begonia through the magnifying glass.

 
     
    On the other lightbox lies in Petri dishes various satellite images of cities and dried bacterial colonies.