NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS – 2024
Nothing is what it seems. This phrase transports us back to immemorial times when humanity – captive inside the cave – imagined the world after the shadows cast on the wall. This history is only a parable, a theoretical construct which, however absurd, constituted the basis of western thought up until the last century.
The theory of mimesis stipulates that art, and images are only a shadow of things, a second class reality, fatally connected to an external reference. The XX-th century, with its avant-garde, finally brought a non-referential, if equally illusionary, art and showed, through Magritte’s famous „Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, the arbitrary nature of the symbolic. Apart from that, however, there is a deeper, more unsettling implication, which is that reality itself is not what it seems. From Indian philosophy to the Matrix (and, more recently, artificial intelligence), the idea that “life is a dream”, that the reality we perceive is but an illusion, a collective delirium, is insidiously slithering into our dreams and nightmares. The only moments that show the profoundly factual character of this reality are certain coincidences, the feeling of déjà-vu – of unheimlich as Freud would put it – a slight disparity that makes us see the glitch in the matrixes. The exhibition Nothing is what it seems questions our idea of representation, of the correspondence between what we see/ imagine and reality. Bringing together the creations of nine artists who explore various visual media like photography, painting, graphic, ceramic/ glass, video and installation, the exhibition underlines an interdisciplinary approach of the current artistic practices, with an emphasis on the performative/ installation character that they amass in the space. A definite characteristic of contemporary art is the immersivity of the works. Thus, the formal limits of reception start to progressively dissolve, allowing the viewer to connect to art not as it was a tangible entity, but more as an extension and interpreted projection of their own existence.
Nothing Is What It Seems – as a collective exhibition – becomes a challenge and an invitation to consider the visual from a perspective free of stereotypes, as a starting point for discovering particular artistic practices.
Artists: Anca Bodea, Andrei Budescu, Aleksandra Chaushova, Teodora Cosman, Octavian Cosman, Ada Muntean, Alexandra Mureșan, Matthieu Marre, Julia Lebrao Sendra
This project was created/ curated by Teodora Cosman & Ada Muntean
The Cosman Foundation Cluj-Napoca
