Contemporary identity between technology and myth
By Chiara Conforti
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Mirrors, myths, photographs: in every era, media shape how we perceive ourselves. Today algorithmic systems take in our reflection and spit back a distorted image of us.
How can we navigate and represent a world in which the act of seeing can never be neutral, and in which reality itself seems to flicker and slip, always just beyond the grasp of certainty?
On Friday 7 November, the spaces of The Address in Brescia opened Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures, by the artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.
A complex, unprecedented exhibition in which the artists investigate the fragmentation of the individual, building a narrative across human history and digital presence. Between installations, works and a short film, the atmosphere is unsettling and suspended: the unease is necessary, because it forces us to ask essential questions, to reflect.
Gawęda and Kulbokaitė work with spirits, myth and technology: they show us how the body is the result of a continuous contamination by different media. Their research explores precisely the liminality of human identity: how it is defined through history and folklore, how it is reshaped by beliefs, its relationship with the double, and how it behaves in a digitised age.
We are constantly scanned, duplicated and shattered into data: it is a new kind of disintegration, a fracture between the self and its representations. The investigation of the body through fragmentation is already rooted in the works of Duchamp, Picabia and Witkacy, who were the first to try to translate graphically the complexity of modern man.
Weaving a continuum, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė offer a symbolic language for what cannot be explained.
The artists are not looking for solutions; rather, they invite us to inhabit fragmentation, to reconnect with what Daisy Hildyard calls the second body: the dispersed body, entangled with ecosystems, environment, data and history. We do not need to understand it fully, but to accept our continuous interconnection: to feel how we are, at the same time, permeated and permeating.