Furnace Voyage in Petrol Gardens The Space Conductors Are Among Us – Part 1, at P/////AKT
In our attempts to understand that which has come and gone before us, we have always looked to the cultural artefacts and heirlooms that have remained after the processes of time have enacted upon them.
Yet, upon examining these artefacts; a terracotta vase, a papyrus scripture, sarcophagi, what one may find is not particularly revelatory, lends no great insight into lost cities and civilisations, but rather, our own society, our own cultures, and consequentially and most poignantly, our own conceptions of time – a profound need to prevent, preserve and protect from it.
For time is extremely fickle in nature, especially as it relates to ourselves, and it is this relationship that Stian Ådlandsvik seeks to explore in his show, Furnace Voyage in Petrol Gardens The Space Conductors Are Among Us – Part 1, at P/////AKT. Traversing both time and space, Ådlandsvik regards the mediums, techniques and processes that comprise his practice as a kind site, albeit a poetic one, for the conduction between geographical loci, their epochs and the ideas and knowledge that were born out of these periods. In doing so, the artist reasserts the individual stories of these artefacts and their capacities to communicate those stories.
Time is challenging. The application of cultural history to our conception of time becomes just as challenging a process; invoking new and different perspectives may serve only to taint, obscure and reshape it.
What Ådlandsvik seeks to suggest, is that time, present time, is not linear, not separate from time past, but rather connected, which as he demonstrates, is a connection formed from the shared culture signifiers. Ådlandsvik curates our present and given pasts to interrogate the similitudes and dissimilitudes existing between them, that may not even exist in our rational minds, but only by virtue of a false conception of times present and past being severed from one and other.
Until 1 March.