Artists: Azar Alsharif (NO/IR) / Diogo Evangelista (PT) / Anna Franceschini (IT) / Matyáš Chochola (CZ) /Henning Lundkvist (SE) / Nuno da Luz (PT) / Ana Manso (PT) / Nikolai Nekh (RUS) André Romão (PT)/ Iza Tarasewicz (PL).
Magic has been traditionally perceived in opposition to the beliefs of Western culture. It's understanding has been shaped around a conceptual field that was meant to define an antithesis of modernity. This was thought to recede and gradually disappear as rationalisation and secularisation spread through out society. Such an understanding of magic was naturally connected and strengthened by fields of study such as anthropology, which has plaid an important role in defining the modern man, whose rationality, secularity and whose scientific based values supposedly stood in direct opposition to magic's spiritual origins. In fact it was anthropology, which has helped to develop a tradition of embedding magic into arguments about difference, reinforcing thus...the idea of Western superiority and playing an essential role in the colonial history of the West. Surprisingly or not, it became the same Western colonial history, which has also applied modes of representation, communication, persuasion and coercion, which although thought of as rational, technical and utterly different from the field of magic, in fact embodied some of the key attributes of magic, making thus the first step towards the so-called modernization of the term and the incorporation of magic into the modern and the later transformed - contemporary Self.
Once the somewhat reductive categories of witchcraft, ritual, religion, magic or science - if we like, are taken out of their complex competition in defining the real, the realisation of an effort to institutionalise cosmologies driven by an obvious power struggle, comes to the fore. Such a power struggle is based on a system of socially established beliefs. This understanding and institutionalisation of magic transforms a conceptual field into a practical tool and a possible means of domination, manipulation or possession. To understand this shift fully however, we have to understand the ways in which forms of magic's publicity and secrecy complement or supplement each other and the ways in which the persuasiveness of the symbols we live by, thrives on a combination of faith and concealment. An example can be seen in the core of the neo-liberal economy, which is based on the idea of commodity fetishism - one of the multiple fields, which has adopted fully the so-called strategies of modern magic. The commodity form and its magic is founded on the basis of commodity representing the social, while concealing the character of the labour, which produces its. Similarly to the labour economy the dialectics of publicity and secrecy are based here on the process of concealment, where the social relation of producers of objects and objects as such, are presented as separate and conceal the concrete character of the product itself. We are faced here with the immaterial, may it be represented by the absent body or the concealed nature of a supposedly empowered object.
Magician's Right Hand brings together works by artists whose practice addresses some of the key attributes of so called modern magic, while manifesting their proximity to the economy of daily life and to the construction of modernity as such. The colonisation of the human mind, the economy of desire, the architecture of symbolic capital or the politics of the immaterial body are only some of the examples encoded within a mutually shared contemporary belief system within the ruins of which we find ourselves today.
Entrada actualizada el el 29 sep de 2016
¿Te gustaría añadir o modificar algo de este perfil?
