A Mental Mandala is a project at MUAC in Mexico City that comprises three main elements: an exhibition, a choreography, and a text: “An exhibition of raw, white and blacks paintings taking the shape of a film-still gradually fragmented are disseminated throughout the galleries. Inside the gallery, the black monochromes act in turn and alternatively as the screens for the projected films as an exhibition realised together with Swiss artist Philippe Decrauzat. This series focuses on filming a musician as he produces the soundtrack for this film to be. Portraits of musicians F.M. Einheit, Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, and Alan Vega are superimposed with a landscape that encompasses views of a textile factory, dunes of the Sahara desert or extreme close up of a nylon canvas smeared with acid as instructed by Gustav Metzger.
In the other gallery, the presence of the body through time unveils a slow inscription in space as a dancer works an imaginary line. A score written by French choreographer Myriam Gourfink for one dancer, Margot Dorléans, choreograph a walk whose duration is that of an exhibition. Ultimately, this score is both the instructions for the dancer, the libretto for the public, the memory of what had happen, and for what is about it to happen.
The sensitive articulation in time and space of the exhibition ultimately takes the form of a text. This writing act as a dramaturgy to what is present, taking an exhibition and the presentation of artefacts as the means to generate a new narrative, reframing what is to be seen in the mind of the one who reads. A possible comprehension of the mandala – the ephemeral, and the mind – the immaterial, offers the sensitive mental experience of an exhibition that looks at one. A Mental Mandala is a choreographed exhibition whose sole reality exists within the minds of the ones who complements it all.”
A Mental Mandala at MUAC Mexico City. August 17, 2013. Video by Diego García Sotomoro.
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