Exhibition Text

Artists

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Hypernuit draws together a series of works by Clémence de la Tour du Pin (1986, France), Pedram Sazesh (1993, Iran/Canada) and Vytautas Kumža (1992, Lithuania). The title “Hypernuit” belongs to a song by French artist Bertrand Belin, who writes “la nuit s’entour la maison” or “the night surrounds the house”. Belin writes of a character fleeing his burning home, escaping the past but refusing to forget it. This sense of a dark spiral, surrounding a place one feels safe can be felt in the means through which language, materiality, identity and chronology are challenged. The exhibition presents a looming peril to structures that have come to stabilize our means of interacting with the world around us.

Clémence de La Tour du Pin has a versatile oeuvre comprised of sculpture, painting and film that often has a tactile or olfactive dimension. Drawing from an archive of audio recordings, images and reliquary materials - La Tour du Pin condenses these aggregated artifacts into works that demonstrate the plasticity of the past. These objects are caught in a contorted state between hoarding and preservation. Collectively, they advocate for the importance of the personal record in the recollection of history. This fascination with history and memory forms the bedrock of her research - wherein La Tour du Pin investigates the weight of associations that emerge from the olfactory experience. Amongst her presentation is a short video of a conversation between two women discussing about molecules for the conception of a fragrance. The works fold the past into the present, asking how something can be considered history when it is so tightly interwoven into the fabric of the present.

Meanwhile, Pedram Sazesh investigates the mythologies and politics of geographical regions - a curiosity fuelled by his experience of migration - from Italy to Canada and the USA, all the while reconciling these factors with his Iranian heritage. He investigates how the systems surrounding and subjectivities of such an intermeshed upbringing relate to identity, and how such devices as the passport or visa either impede or streamline this movement. The works become an analogy for how such experiences “imprint” on a person. Sazesh has come to understand such states in relation to a wind that might surround a person, an “aerodynamic drag” that prevents fluid movement across borders of state or identity, such as ideology or documentation. His works embody this through transferals of forms and color between surfaces. Images are silkscreened, painted or otherwise shared across materials. Leaving pigments and dyes to flow organically, such that the interplay of chance and topography dictate the final outcome.

The work of Vytautas Kumza presents us with a decisive challenge to the conventions of photography. Kumza’s works seek to complicate our division between photography as flat image, and the three-dimensionality of an object. His works fluently present photographs as objects in their own right. Kumza captures and reinforces moments of strangeness and instability in everyday moments - using various materials from epoxy, glass, hair, mirrors and coloured foil he generates an illusory space that seems to capture an uncanny moment. Within his chimeric objects Kumza emphasizes the artifice and staging of commercial photography using a refined visual vocabulary of spatial constructs, inverted colors and exaggerated scales. Out of the work pours an absurd and antagonistic logic that forces the viewer to reframe their understanding of the mundane and the familiar.