Laking

Exposição na galeria Oksasenkatu 11 em Helsínquia, Finlândia, 2016

imagens da exposição

LAKING by Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves

Laking is the first collaborative exhibition by Portuguese artists Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves, following an invitation by Oksassenkatu 11 artist-run gallery, in Helsinki, Finland. This invitation immediately raised questions about what it means to produce work in collaboration, with its dilution of authorship, the idiosyncrasies of different mediums of representation – drawing, photography, video, and the possibility of occupying a space between spaces of representation.

The experience of staying in a traditional Finnish summer cottage by the lake, by nature an idealized site, was the visual and emotional trigger for this new body of work. Anchored in real images from Finland and Portugal, we have been constructing a metaphorical space which explores the theme of landscape and its modes of representation. Thinking about the internalization of the idea of an exterior landscape (or is it the externalization of the idea of an interior landscape?) and referencing Caspar David Friedrich in general and the rückenfigur in particular, the group of images in this show composed by photographs, drawings and videos, question the observer into discovering a place that is constructed from two places. Certainly not an hybrid, but imagined, who knows utopian.

The duplicity or polarity present in the project (lake-land, Portugal-Finland, drawing-photography, interior-exterior, container-contained, matter-contour, day-night, ice-earth, Daniel-Rita) is constantly opposed by the idea of a visceral aquatic fusionism. 

As with relationships, to understand a lake, demands this double acceptance of fusion and dilution, and individuality.

The lake´s components such as algae, stones, animals, boats... are integrated and fused under one concept. But if it is true that all the elements form the lake and participate of it, they still keep their form and original nature, their individuality.

The title of the exhibition Laking, plays with the words Lake and Lacking, in a new verb to lake. The idealized idea of a lake where in fusion we become one, always including the understanding of the impossibility of its full realization.

Laking, a verbal form that didn’t exist but now does.

Daniel and Rita wish to thank Marta Moreira de Almeida and Miguel von Hafe Pérez, Pia Euro, Varpu and Seppo Saarinen, as ­­­­­well as Instituto Camões and Oksasenkatu 11.

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