Carolina Grau /Curator
Around the Corner:
Fikret Atay, Ceal Floyer, Gabriel Kuri and Erwin Wurm at Cristina Guerra Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon, Portugal.
Around the corner is a group exhibition exploring ways in which a number of artists engage with the everyday and their surroundings. The four artists in the exhibition are inspired by the quotidian world about them, and each artist sees it from a different perspective, each of them showing us very different ways in which the world can be given value and meaning. This is an exhibition about five different and individual points of view, that of the four artists and also, inevitably, the curator's own. It is an exhibition about meaning and emptiness.
Everyone sees the world from wherever they happen to find themselves. As the Istanbul-based novelist Orphan Pamuk remarked recently, 'I have lived virtually in the same street all my life and I currently live in the apartment block where I was brought up. But this is how it has to be for me and this is what I do. And look at my view. From here it is not so difficult to see the world.'
In 'Working Title (Digging)', 1995, we are confronted by two sound speakers and an audio system on the floor of the gallery, which plays the sound of a hole being dug in the ground.
The video 'Bang, Bang!', 2003, shows four boys 'playing' war, between two immobile trains in a shunting yard. Atay follows the two teams with a hand-held camera, like a war reporter, while the boys run, take cover and shoot each other with toy guns. The video finishes with one of the boys playing 'dead' and the others gathering around in silence.