Exit Elephantine
Curated by Edgaras Gerasimovičius
On Friday, 14 June at 5 PM, the group exhibition Exit Elephantine curated by Lithuanian contemporary art curator Edgaras Gerasimovičius will open at the Tallinn City Gallery (13 Harju Street). The exhibition features artists Natalie Czech, Tata Frenkel, Robertas Narkus, Agnieszka Polska, Nesim Tahirovič and Gintautas Trimakas.
The group exhibition Exit Elephantine explores how a border in one person’s life can become a line in another person’s drawing. Using plastic means, the works displayed interpret the stories of individuals and communities who have found themselves behind a specific physical, psychological, political or social border – voluntarily, accidentally or forcibly.
Not all works in the exhibition are artworks. Some are fragments of larger works, remnants of the production process, or even rumours. This eclectic polyphony creates a space where losses and errors from the translation process hint at the meeting of the personal and the collective. Here poetics of escapism becomes a tool to dismantle the narratives of the mainstream politics of escapism.
In the exhibition title, the Ultima Thule of the ancient world, the island of Elephantine, takes on the role of a clumsy, heavyweight character in a well-known English metaphor representing an evidently ignored problem. Neither imperative for action, nor a thing, Exit Elephantine is a more of an error mode of semantic production for intimacy and ultimate distance to intersect.
On Saturday, 15.06, artist Tata Frenkel will present a performative lecture titled How One Levitates Safely. The long-format sketches and diagrams that Tata has collected over the years serve as methodical documentations of verbal storytelling. They reflect the technical, biomechanical and mental ways a person transforms into a Foucault pendulum, a flying machine, a Luftmensch, or a radio body.
Tata Frenkel is an artist-researcher and thereminist who works in the fields of electroacoustics and education.
Edgaras Gerasimovičius is an art historian and curator at the Sapieha Palace in Vilnius, as well as a co-founder of the Swallow project space.
The exhibition will be open until 18 August.