Till August 31 in Mori Art Museum Tokyo.
Melvin Moti (born 1977, The Netherlands) produces works grounded in intensive research that explore neurological, scientific and historical processes in relation to visual culture.
MAM Project 021 will be a solo exhibition introducing Moti’s work for the first time in Japan, and will showcase Cluster Illusion, a new series of textile pieces. Combining delicate Japanese komon patterns with star maps, Cluster Illusion, examines the universal human tendency to conjure up pictures and grand visions from random dots and abstract figures.
Image: Herschel’s Milky Way, 2014.
On ‘Eigengrau (Intrinsic Greay) from 2011 (review in Frieze)
Art and kitsch, high culture and mass culture, art work and culture industry – the time-honoured delimiting gestures of bourgeois distinction have persisted well into the present. Even the countless mass-cultural gestures of the contemporary art scene hardly change this distinction. But Melvin Moti’s work seems to effortlessly avoid these oppositions. He puts the question differently: not so much ‘Is it art?’ as ‘What actually is it in the end?’
At his first gallery exhibition in Berlin, ‘Eigengrau (The Inner Self in Outer Space)’, Moti presented one work from 2011 with this same title (Eigengrau – intrinsic grey – is the colour the human eye perceives in total obscurity). The work consisted of a 35mm film installation, a series of framed colour photographs and a limited edition artist book. Together, the elements of the exhibition – film, photography and print – presented exemplary crafted artefacts detached from their respective social histories: British vases, Iranian wood carvings and a Thai figure in gold leaf, all of them from the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). But in Moti’s case, the artefacts have not been detached from their contexts for the sake of an increase in museal distinction, as was once done at the museum.
On the contrary, Moti’s selection seems arbitrary, his artefacts appear to be independent protagonists of a cultural history without distinctions. So it seemed only logical that the 35mm film screened at the start of the exhibition should have shown these very objects floating freely for 19 minutes, orbiting like meteors in a zero-gravity space populated with model planets. This universe appears to encompass each of its objects with the same intent interest – yet without establishing any sort of hierarchy between them. In the artist book, Moti’s photographs of the items from the V&A collection are printed without frames. And the adjacent captions are not his but those of the museum, where the contextless fetishization of objects engenders an interior space with as little fresh air as the outer space in Moti’s film.
By parading the principle of decontextualization as an artistic gesture – carried along by the analogue sci-fi aesthetic of the 1970s, by glowing colours and plays of light – Moti’s aestheticization of the contextless took on a life – and a context – of its own. He wrote a number of texts to accompany the show, entangling his work in a complex net of references. The invitation referred solely to the exhibition title; the press release concentrated on the role of the V&A; whilst the essay in his artist book traced an array of distinguishing characteristics in cultural education. Thus the artist himself made more than enough material available for a historical, social and cultural grounding, but the disconnectedness and contradictoriness of the texts did not allow the information to be hierarchized. This exhibition, along with the texts, was nourished by an intent fixation on its own constituent elements.
Translated by Jonathan Blower
—by Kerstin Stakemeier
Robert Kloos on The Prisoner’s Cinema.
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce Melvin Moti: The Prisoner’s Cinema, the first U.S. museum exhibition of the work of Dutch artist Melvin Moti (b. 1977, Rotterdam). Working primarily with the medium of film, Melvin Moti gives form to incidents, events, and subjects lost in the history of the 20th century. The artists practice often revolves around research on a forgotten, hidden, or obscure phenomenon detached from the historical narrative. The core of the exhibition at the MIT List Center will be Moti’s 35mm film The Prisoner’s Cinema (2008), based on research into hallucinations caused by visual deprivation.
In 1954, scientist John Lilly first used a sensory deprivation tank, also known as an isolation tank, to investigate the hypothesis that the brain would fall asleep after a prolonged lack of sensory stimuli. After conducting several daylong sessions in the tank, Lilly found that being cut off from any sensory information had the exact opposite effect on the brain; he began to experience a series of complex visual and auditory hallucinations.
The “prisoner’s cinema” is a phenomenon described in the literature of the neuro and optical sciences as hallucinations resulting from such prolonged visual deprivation. Prisoners confined in a dark cell as well as airline pilots and truck drivers have repeatedly described experiencing the multicolored play of light. This light phenomenon is a response to being subjected to a dark or unchanging visual field for periods of time. The reduced stimulation of vision produces various colors and forms that seem to emerge out of darkness, or take the form of geometric shapes “projected” in front of the viewer. These vivid hallucinations are a physiological reaction to the absence of visual information. The ‘prisoner’s cinema’ is also thought to be an explanation for some types of supernatural phenomena as well as religious visions.
Based on studies by Lilly (1954) and Heinrich Klüver (1926), about sensory response in conditions of visual deprivation and on hallucinations and formalism, Moti’s poetically crafted film depicts subtle colored light shining through a rose window. As the phenomenon and its narration unfold, the viewer is left to wonder if one is not encountering the very same phenomenon the film is about.
The exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center will also include The Biography of a Phantom (2004), a series of Polaroid® images documenting several locations in which the ghost of Katie King has appeared. The spirit of Katie King, perhaps the most photographed ghost in the history of spiritualism, first appeared in 19th century Ohio, claiming to be the spirit of Anne Owen Morgan, daughter of Caribbean buccaneer Henry Owen Morgan (1635 – 1688) and Mary Elizabeth Morgan. Anne’s birth date is unknown; when she died at the age of 21 she would have been married and had two children. After the death of Henry Morgan, his ghost appeared, now calling himself ‘John King’. Anne’s spirit adopted her father’s new ghostly name when she herself ‘manifested’. Moti’s series of photographs document the locations in which the ghost of Katie King has appeared in the city of London, as well as a supposed portrait of her apparition.
Melvin Moti: The Prisoner’s Cinema is organized by João Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
About the Artist
Melvin Moti was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1977, and he studied at the Academie Voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg, The Netherlands from 1995 to 1999 and worked at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 1999 to 2001, where he now teaches. His work has been exhibited at several European institutions, including the FRAC Champagne in Reims, France, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany and the Kunstverein Köln, Cologne, Germany. He recently participated in the 5th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany and his work was on view in a solo exhibition from February 19 through April 25, 2010 at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium. He lives and works in Rotterdam.
Eigenlicht (the inner self in outer space), 2012.
From Dust to Dust, detail installation, 2012.
Courtesy: Meyer Riegger, Berlin