PERIPHERAL SUN
VIN VIN GALLERY . VIENNA . AUSTRIA
2022
Curator : Kami Gahiga
The exhibition features the artworks of four artists: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Kapwani Kiwanga, Marin Majic and Maja Ruznic. The selected artists hail from the Eastern Coasts of Africa and the Balkan peninsula, yet each one has a distinctive approach in relation to aspects of nationalism and holds no central attachment to one specific identity or country. The exhibition explores how the cartesian and symbolic meaning of borders erode with displacement and migration. Themes of longing, nostalgia, the in-between and melancholy manifest in each of the artists’ works through a multiplicity of media: painting, installation, drawing, and collage.
Peripheral Sun initiates a debate about whose compass is acknowledged when thinking about the East and recognizes the different poles of influence that exist today.
The layout of the exhibition design leads the viewer to accustome to alternative vantage points without relying on a specific linear route, thus creating an open network of exchange with no set trajectory.
© Vin Vin Gallery
The elegant precision and simplicity found across Andrianomearisoa’s œuvre is conveyed in his three-dimensional structure Maison Imaginaire, which echoes the artist’s training as an architect through his engagement with space and environment.
Maison Imaginaire (2021) is a model of Andrianomearisoa’s monumental metallic sculpture that the artist was commissioned to realise in Aigues-Mortes, France. His structure elegantly floated between two of Aigues-Mortes’ historic towers. The city’s fortified walls and port were built in the 13th century by King Louis IX to establish a trade route to the East, and witnessed the departure of the seventh and eighth Western crusades.
Andrianomearisoa’s Maison Imaginaire evokes the paradox of human desires: to root itself through built structures while simultaneously desiring to escape, to break walls and barriers. Robust at first glance given its steel composition it is simultaneously fragile, ambiguous, and open-ended.
Étoffe des Songes (2016) is a black and white diptych that reflects the artist’s fascination for textiles’ malleable qualities which he declines through the layering of various shades of black and white. Madagascar is home to some of the finest silk and cloth production centers. The diptych equally demonstrates Andrianomearisoa’s investigation of contrasting elements and duality. On a smaller physical scale but with equal resonance are his drawings Soratra (2022), which fuse the concerns of his past projects and his installation I Have Forgotten the Night he presented at the Venice Biennale. It comprises a series of 8-diptychs depicting texts and poems written in Malagasy, French and English, realized specifically for Peripheral Sun. Andrianomearisoa’s welding of contrasts capture the balanced interplay of opposite elements.
Kami Gahiga