SPINNING ON AN AXIS

When a body moves relatively to the fixed stars, centrifugal forces are produced; when it moves relatively to some different body, and not relatively to the fixed stars, no centrifugal forces are produced… If a heavenly body be conceived rotating about its axis and consequently subject to centrifugal forces and therefore oblate, nothing, so far as we can judge, can possibly be altered in its condition by the removal of all the remaining heavenly bodies. The body in question will continue to rotate and will continue to remain oblate. But if the motion be relative only, then the case of rotation will not be distinguishable from that of rest…The concept of force and the principle of action and reaction follow of themselves. And the elimination of absolute motion is equivalent to the elimination of what is physically meaningless.

Mach Ernst, The Science of Mechanics (1883

In mathematics, a rotation designates a rigid body movement by keeping a point fixed. Departing from this definition along with Ernst’s principles on mechanics, a series of questions could be posed to understand our relationship with the spaces that we settle, see, and hear about or even with the ones that we could never experience: What does it mean to be fixated to a point? How do we keep on doing same actions, feeling same things, and living same experiences? Could rotating be perceived as repetition? What does it mean to stop this process of rotation?  Spinning On An Axis exhibition hovers around these questions and their multiple answers in various layers by intersecting two exceptional projects of Yane Calovski and Benji Boyadgian.

Yane Calovski’s practice is concerned with experiential ideas often situated in the site-specificity of a new cultural and political geography. Calovski is interested in reactivating, rather then fictionalizing, existing inconclusive modernist narratives that may, as active memories, become “reactive” imagination, or rather, evocations that generate imagination. His works emerge from his evolving experience within disparate international contexts and are often situated in the public domain. With his project Interlocutor, by research into displacement and transformations through diverse visual and conceptual narratives, Calovski has built objects with an unresolved contextual potential.

The Palestinian artist Benji Boyadgian employs his forms of expression through the blend of watercolor techniques. His works features encounters of the architectural relics and consequences of the political and social situations in combination with beautiful imageries of his perception. Boyadgian’s project A journey into Abstrabesque is a dialogue between geometrical arabesque patterns and abstract art paradigms. The pattern design stems from oriental arts and craft iconography. Boyadgian uses the tiles as a metaphor for surface, the surface as a concept. The surfaces of the patterns erode as layers of watercolour flow. It’s an allusion to the history of Palestine, a place at a junction. For Boyadgian, in the journey through this world we fuse with the forces of erosion, playing our part in the mutation of the physical and metaphysical.