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Known Unknowns

Known Unknowns
2014
Wooden structure, graphite dust, newspaper, 450 x 500cm
Shown as part of Mundus Vadit Retro, KIBLA, Maribor, Slovenia

There are three key elements to the work – the temporary wall structure, the bodies formed from line drawings, and the wall-text. Together these elements produce a balance of stability and temporality, form and formlessness. The bodies-rendered-as-lines (line drawings in space) hang from the rigid structure in a way that recalls clothes on hooks or perhaps washing left to dry, but while the bodies might be thought to be malleable and vulnerable they are also versatile. If the wall is some sort of impasse or constraining structure then the bodies/cut-out lines find a way to slip in, or out, or around it in a tricky manner. Franco Berardi describes a theory of ‘semiocapitalism’ in which power technology aims at our human resources, so contemporary forms of economy, omnipresent work, impact upon our body in various ways. We fall asleep in unusual places, on the way to work, at work, on the way home from work, and some of us might eat lunch ‘al-desko’. The bodies alluded to here might be exhausted bodies, although equally they might just be slight, light, transient and ephemeral. And in this context, the wall text that’s based on George W’s infamously smart-dumb speech about variants of known/unknown known’s adds a notion about a collective illusive body that is simultaneously here and elsewhere.