YOU ARE at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg, Sweden
14 September – 17 November 2019
Morakot (Emerald) A Dialogue, an interpretation
of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s video work
Morakot (Emerald) by Nazanin Raissi
Translated by Johannes Nordholm
Through neuronal mirror mechanisms, every human’s consciousness silently branches out and connects to the bodies of other humans. The mirror neurons are an inner system for understanding, which unites the viewer, the I, with Morakot.
To those who behind its walls longed for home, for Nong Khai and Kanchanaburi.
To the artist.
To the living and to the dead.
Morakot are mystifications that bear traces of both the human consciousness and the unconscious. Like ephemeral particles hovering in a room. Like beings emanating from an absent you.
The viewer is proprioceptive and perceives the position of the body and its movement in relation to space. Seeing is body. Sensations are represented in a tactile sphere. Breathing, skin, heart beats and muscular tension. Meaning and significance are revealed on the pre-reflective, subliminal level of physical seeing. The effect precedes the cause.
Morakot is a movement sequence of images and sounds that have become liberated from their original place and time.
Morakot becomes body, feelings and thoughts.
To be moved by something requires the feeling of recognition. Feelings are mental portraits of bodily processes in continuous transformation. In the recognizable, Morakot mirrors the I of the viewer. Not like in a mirror that shows the body. Morakot mirrors inner spaces in the psyche of the artist, which the viewer appropriates because they correspond to something true.
Truth is body, feelings and thoughts.
Thoughts are images. Visual, auditive and somatosensory inner monologues. Morakot is a neuropsychological simulation. Images are memories. Fleeting copies and approximative reconstructions of who and what, where and when. Memories are associations that can be given meanings, for instance, that Morakot symbolises the return of time that has passed. A metaphor for the return of the repressed.
Morakot is a memorial.
Memories can be transferred.
The viewer projects memories – who and what, where and when – into Morakot. Copies and reconstructions enter its space. In the psychological process of transference, the boundaries between subject and object, space and time, are blurred. Morakot becomes a hybrid. Partly object, partly the I of the beholder.
Where the outer and the inner collapse, there is an invisible area for play.
The area for play is a fluctuating intersubjective zone for transferred, formed memories – object and subject, space and time. A fluctuating intersubjective zone for the imaginary. For happiness and confusion, for identification and potential meaning.
Between every viewer and Morakot lie replicable areas of play that contain the unconstrained and the not yet possible.
Morakot is a dialogue. Without the viewer, Morakot is nothing.
Bibliography:
Damasio, R. D. (1999) Descartes misstag. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur
Freud, S. (2009) Konst och litteratur. Samlade skrifter av Sigmund Freud. Band XI. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur
Hustvedt, S. (2012) Living, thinking, looking. London: Sceptre
Jones, A. (2002). The ‘eternal return’: Self-portrait photography as a technology of embodiment. Signs. Vol. 27:4, p 947-978
McWilliams, N. (1994) Psykoanalytisk diagnostik. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand
Ramachandran, V. S. (2011) The tell-tale brain. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company
Winnicott, D. W. (2003) Lek och verklighet. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur
UMBRA MA Photography Show at LCC, London, UK
14–18 November 2018
Exhibition foreword by Lee Mackinnon
Photographers have been known as shadow catchers: those that dwell at the edge of the frame, taming the light. A life spent domesticating spectral patterns of matter as they flow and reform. An image is a mass of moving parts. There is nothing static here, only relative scales of time and motion. Liquid traces of the world are temporarily contained and slowed to a fraction of a second. Or set in space to reorganise the flow of time. The complexity of space-time is compressed into a surface that troubles scholars.
Behind each surface, a complex series of chemical negotiations. Cosmic interactions make mundane suburbs; Supernovas are visible in blades of grass. The day is owned by a mass of hot plasma that rises overhead without the slightest surprise. Light bends as it moves from one substance to another: this refraction is visible in the twinkling of stars, the glinting of crystal, the way water abstracts the bodies within it.
What you see here is a studied effect: years of careful construction that assume an immediate form. What remains unseen is the pure physical effort of holding and honing an idea that it might become seemingly effortless and distilled. Look! The light is already fading. Pixel and grain dance, dislodging themselves from sight. Objects are redrawn in halftone.
Everything is just beginning.