RITUALE

The reflections on shattered glass strewn across a tiled door, the bristles of a brush that don't seem quite right, the slow burn of candles indented with the artist’s hand. Disorientation and upended expectations are hallmarks of the ritualistic state. Passing through violent purification to the hermetically sealed underworld, from light to dark, the flip side of the mirror. In a time of slowly fluctuating mass hysterias and widespread paranoia, the exhibition examines the role of ritual process as an effort to bring order to chaos .Showing how the intangible takes effect on the physical world , and vice versa. An unseen force is at work, artifacts position themselves in an intuitive choreography, making up a set of relations that invoke the sites of Rituale, an exhibition by artists Sandra Moral and Kay Yoon.The artworks pointing to events either past or unseen, suggestions of a drama or violence which lays just beyond experience, remnants left behind, symbols pointing elsewhere, sanctified objects imbued with meaning and portent, each taking their position in this formalized setting. The approach to the work itself is ritualized, ideas of grief, loss, repetition,transformation, even metamorphosis are taken up by the artists, and acted upon the objects as if through exorcism, purification, or incantation. Throughout the exhibition markers of spirituality and materiality appear. The body is the meeting point for these apposing ontologies, and through them it is endlessly reshaped. Manipulations of language and meaning recall obscure approaches to exacting mystical influence over reality. Protracted limbs which have become claws show a chaotic reordering of the body, a primal self-expression, while the reflective mirrored surfaces and ultra clean finish of 3d printed plastics suggest an idealized absolute, an iconographic beyond. In the Dionysian mysteries the mirror was thought to be used during initiation, looked into by the disembodied initiate, who becomes enraptured by their own physical reflection, this is a metaphor for the drawdown of the spirit into incarnation. Foucault has said that the mirror is the perfect mixing place between the utopia and the heterotopia. It is a utopia in that it is a placeless place, and it demonstrates his concept of heterotopia, in how it presents us with an alternate reality, that of our own reflection, while maintaining its own reality, its own place, in a place that we are not. Rituale can be seen as another Heterotopia, a world within a world, a place both mental and physical, where organic transcendence and synthetic absolution vie for influence.