OLEKSIY KOVAL / REUTENGALERIE AMSTERDAM

S H A T T E R E D
R E A L I T Y

The plummet is hanging in the middle of the room. It measures, it feels, it scans the room. Bang goes a thought! Where does it come from? We cannot only be seen as Elementary Particles, I mean: We, as we stand here. No, we are really floating in an ocean of influences, with which we are intertwined from all sides, which we inhale into our system and by which we are shaped. At every given moment we find ourselves in this “architecture” of thoughts, of progressing technology, of design, of given meaning and of information.

In the last three decades this architecture of thoughts, -objects, -technical means and -information all around us, is radically changing it’s let’s say: taste-, it’s atmosphere.
We, and now I mean: the curators of this Shattered Reality exhibition, anyway felt it that way. One aspect of this change is the shattering of a once believed and collectively accepted: Bigger Story, meant to describe our reality for us. That simply disappeared. We live in a Shattered Reality now. Our reality seems to have become one giant cut and mended collage. Cut cut mended…! No bigger stories anymore, although some (late political) minds want us to believe they have a new one for us. But this “Boreal” story (allusion on contemporary Dutch populist politics) is: Boring..!!!, we -in the end- simply don’t want to accept that anymore. One can recognize this Shattered-ness -literally- everywhere. In our designing practices, in our interfaces, in our individually being sooner distracted-ness, in our layouts of magazines, and in our way of presenting contemporary art itself.

It is this scent of transition into a Shattered Reality,…that we have tried to “get hold of” .. or at least that we have tried to refer to. This is as much, I think, as we should say about it here.

In the meantime it was Martin Heidegger already, who -66 years before- succeeded in describing the atmosphere of our contemporary transition, according to this quote, with which I would like to conclude:

“As soon as that, which is not hidden, (the truth, that technology gave birth to..) is no longer even of any concern to mankind as an object, but only as a file; and when, within this objectless-ness mankind is no more than the commander of the file – then mankind is on the verge of crashing, that is to say: to be himself only understood as a file.
Meanwhile, a mankind, that is thus threatened, poses as the lord of the world.” Martin Heidegger, 1953

Thank you Antoinette Reuten for realizing this exhibition, thanks Lon Robbé, Eric Martijn, Oleksiy Koval end Federico Murgia for your flashy contribution to this show, and thanks everybody here for showing up. Lots of pleasure with this show.

(text: Paksha van Slooten, March 2019, Amsterdam)