Upon visiting Elia Nurvista’s Früchtlinge (2019) solo exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, one is confronted with a theatre of images where autonomous digital, virtual and biological technologies interact with each other. This ensemble of images, producing both complementary and contradictory symbolic relations between independent objects—six digital prints, an installation of three dough sculptures set on a low-standing table supplemented with fresh fruits and flour and a video animation installed with sound—, carries aesthetic consequences. The role of the audience is not necessarily to validate the works but to join and possibly contribute to their multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial system.
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo courtesy Elia Nurvista.
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo courtesy Elia Nurvista.
The digital pictures are printed and mounted on walls, which is to say that they exist on a planar support. Flat objects tend to highlight what is on their surfaces. In this case there are pictorial illusions of three-dimensional still lifes and landscapes set on two-dimensional surfaces. The eye is goaded on to perceive distance, depth, volume and mass; all of which are merely optical. The eye is also beckoned to contemplate a picture that is contrived to exist solely within the boundaries of the rectangular shape of the support in a particular position in space and can only be seen from an angle that is exclusively frontal. The video animation gives virtual form to the ensemble with moving pictures projected onto an opaque surface. The materiality of this image, as opposed to one mediated by a screen, for example, makes it such that any opaque object that enters the region of the streams of light rays, beaming from a source projector, temporarily alters the image form: it could be a fly or a human being breaking the flow of images by becoming immersed in it. Employing this display method also allows for the possibility of liberating flatness and frontality from pictorialist limitations and transforming them into qualities that are enhanced when combined with the aural form. The installation of objects displays unprocessed foods including pineapples, pomegranates, grapes, oranges as well as wheat flour on a table centred in the exhibition space with some components placed directly onto the floor.
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo by author.
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo courtesy Elia Nurvista.
There are similarities and tensions between the effects of how the still and moving pictures mounted on various faces of the walls in the exhibition and the installation of perishable and processed food objects interact, augment and even undermine one another. In a sense, the wall-mounted prints—digitally manipulated pictures remixing 17th century Vanitas still life paintings and other genre scenes—come into conversation with a video animation with sound and the real food objects in the installation, thus conflating the digital, biological and virtual. Whereas the stills operate on a fictional logic of montaging (where new meanings are produced between already-existing images through juxtaposition or other methods of sequencing, evidenced in Nurvista’s DJing of content mined from the internet) and offer artistic experiences accessible only to the eye, the video allows the spectator to encounter virtual worlds by employing both optical and aural images. Even though both still and moving images lead viewers into a frontal position by totalising what is before them, the degree to which this is achieved is more inflexible with the still pictures than it is with the video projection; hence complicating the distance between the form itself and the spectator.
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo by author.
It is important to reflect on this distance (also used as an artistic technique in the exhibition) because it regulates the confrontational encounter between the flat works and their audiences. For the digital prints, the illusion of space is extrinsic to the viewers’ temporal contingencies, commanding only the ‘disembodied eye’. The video animation organises its mode of experience by engaging the body in such a way that it can see, hear and move about in front of the moving image and still be able to come to terms with the work. The experience is made somewhat relative to one’s position in relation to the work, unlike what happens with the printed stills. If the stills display worlds alienating the viewer from realtime, the video animation smuggles a consciousness into the order of things with a body that is aware of itself (and here we cannot evade the question of time and how its literal and conceptual dimensions impact the nexus of relations constituted within the entire exhibition).
Elia Nurvista, Früchtlinge (2019), solo exhibition, Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery, Berlin, photo courtesy Elia Nurvista.
The installation of food objects comes in to obliterate any semblance of a transcendent or ‘over there’ time as it already situates elements directly on the floor. In addition to the possibility of audiences literally picking up any of the fruits—whether to eat or simply to touch and feel—, the work is infused with a kind of readiness or immediacy in terms of experiencing it in the here and now. Literal time becomes the element that activates unpredictable contingencies through perishability. The consumables in the exhibition space produce smells which intensify as they decay. This natural biological event, on its own, also has the potential of inviting other non-human organisms into the experience. In this sense the work can be said to elicit a kind of interactivity and participation that is not exclusive to the human spectator but is one that involves and can be activated by a multiplicity of agents.
In sum, Nurvista’s world of image objects in Früchtlinge seems to thrive as much on coherence as it does on oppositional relations: permanence exists vis-à-vis the ephemeral, transcendence (eternal time) with the profane (or secular time). Its logical framework permits inelastic alienation and proceeds to radically abolish it elsewhere within the constellation through participation. The organising principle of inclusion in the exhibition, even at the risk of unpredictability, attempts to open up the ambit of visuality in order to complicate what/how we see, hear, feel, taste, smell and to involve and implicate even more.
— Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is an artist, curator and writer based in Kumasi, Ghana.
*The exhibition run at Künstlerhaus Bethanien from 17th January to 10th February 2019.
*A version of this text is soon to be published in the exhibition catalog.
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