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Aurora Király
CONJECTURES Spinnerei Galleries, Leipzig 08.09 - 20.10.2018 Anca Poterașu Gallery www.ancapoterasu.com Photographic fragments, oddly familiar wallpaper backgrounds, a modular structure that seems to be bound together by memories. Aurora Király's latest works were exhibited at the Art Museum Timișoara earlier this year, expanding now into the series Settings developed especially for Leipzig, in an exhibition that showcases the artist's versatility in depicting the complex mechanisms of memory. Entitled Conjectures, a term used both in literary criticism and mathematical theorems, the show explores the making of timelines through multiple layers of individual and shared experiences. As its title suggests, the artist's works map out intersections of incomplete information, interactions of different moments, from various spaces, ever-changing, ever-shaping our sense of reality. Aurora Király's practice involves a photographical language even when photographic material is not explicitly used. Stemming from series such as Viewfinder (2014-2017) or Viewfinder mock-up (2016-2017), the artist employs hypotheses on how memory acts upon us, and finds that the photographical process has much in common with it. The geometrical drawings |
(Structures, 2018) underline the non-linearity of events, but also the need to rationalize them, to trace contours and draw connections, in much of the same way that an image is recorded by camera. There is a matter of intentionality, of selection and geometrization that the human mind uses to redefine its bearings, its connection with inner and other spaces. In uncovering these mechanisms, Aurora Király makes use of patterns and materials that conjure a type of nostalgia, such as the wallpaper backgrounds on which several photographs are spread on, or the recognizable embroidery technique unto which unreadable letters are sewn.
Ee um fah um soo foo suii too eem oo... are in fact the lingering nonsensical words sang by a beggar on the street on which the literary character Peter Walsh walks by in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This sensorial memento is meant to create connections between seemingly disparate spaces and roles – linking the traditional embroidery practice to a literary passage, to the different mental triggers pertaining to both worlds. The artist uses imagery and invokes memories of her own, but focuses more on the intersections between them rather than describing a specific moment and context. This anonymization contributes to the building on larger themes connected with traditional roles of womanhood, social norms and the individual response to political and economic shifts, to the way we all build our trajectories of the self throughout the world. Text by Cristina Stoenescu |
