The video Cenit tells a love story that is a metaphor for the celestial moment when the sun casts no shadow. Spinoza’s Ethics and an archaeological examination of Aztec ruins serve as the point of departure for a theory of reality and emotions. In Asef’s view, reconstructing and representing real space in the mind draws on the same mental processes used for constructing the idea of love and happiness. Accordingly, wandering the earth induces an emotional experience that prompts the main character of Cenit to search for the geographical point of happiness.
The work was presented in 2018 at The Drawing Hub Berlin, Germany / Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada and Wildpalms, Düsseldorf, Germany.
single screen projection / duration: 11’ 54’’ min / system: HD Pal – Color / audio: Stereo Digital
Exhibition images by Achim Kukulies and Mario Asef
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Cenit –installatoin view, wild palms, DüsseldorfCenit –installatoin view, wild palms, DüsseldorfCenit –installatoin view, The Drawing Hub, BerlinCenit –installatoin view, wild palms, DüsseldorfCenit –installatoin view, The Drawing Hub, BerlinCenit –drawing, mix media on millimetre paperCenit –drawing, mix media on millimetre paperCenit –drawing, mix media on millimetre paperCenit –video still–Cenit –video still–Cenit –video still–
The video work Crossfade focuses on two types of mass migration between South America and Europe, comparing the process of population expansion in human beings with the expansion dynamics of populations in nature.
The arrival of Europeans in the Americas was an event that would irrevocably change the course of history of mankind. By the time the first explorers had landed, an invasion of the continent had already become inevitable. For sixteenth century Europeans, America became a screen onto which they could project their fantasies of discovering a new Eden. Many of them lost their lives in pursuit of this illusion, while many Native Americans lost theirs in a struggle to defend their way of life. One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare.
In the early twentieth century, the accidental arrival of a species of ant in Europe drastically modified the coastal environment of the European Mediterranean. Shiploads of Argentinean grain, sugar and wood exported to Europe brought with them the species Linepithema Humile, also known as the Argentine ant. This ant is notorious not only for its exceptional reproductive capacity, but also as an invader that kills and enslaves other native species. From Genoa to the Atlantic coast of Portugal, a stretch of nearly 5,600 kilometres along the Mediterranean coast, there exists a super-colony of Argentine ants.
Crossfade –video still–
duration: 6’ 30’’ min and 16′ 30” min / system: HD Pal – Color / audio: Stereo Digital
The work has been presented at Junge Kunst e.V. Wolfsburg, Germany in 2012, at Q21, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Austria 2014, different galleries in London, Berlin and Vienna as well as the Daegu Photo Biennale 2018, South Korea.
The video installation, “Three Anachronisms,” is a trilogy produced between 2010 and 2014 by Mario Asef, in which the artist reflects on three aspects of the constitution of reality. 1. The appropriation and structure of space. 2. The construction of time. 3. The relationship among information, nature and culture. This trilogy, however, is not a philosophical treatise showing the functioning of these categories. Rather, the reality that Asef observes is constituted by deficiencies in three different orders: paradox, coincidence and failure.The urge to wonder about reality occurs in advance, in the formal aspects of the work. Similar to a documentary, Asef dispenses with the staging. The facts are distant so that the artist can modify them directly. The fixed camera and the presence of common places (the terrace, the museum, the plaza), confirm that here the camera is negotiating with what is put in charge without preamble. The presence of a theoretical body, which is the basis for his work, the constant readings of sociological, philosophical and archaeological theories, construct the objectivist building from which Asef casts on reality.
The exhibit’s title reveals that the work is composed of three parts and in turn indicates how the parts relate to each other. Although the three videos were produced over a continuous period of time, the relationship among them is neither temporal nor spatial. Like a medieval altar with its wings unfurled, where each part of the triptych represents different events occurring in different spaces and times, building a narrative that links different events, so do Asef’s videos present singular facts. On the whole, however, the trilogy builds a representation of the events of Asef’s research (social reality as a construct). The variety of approaches, contexts and reflections come to change and destabilize reality itself, exposing its shortcomings.
However, Asef demonstrates, this building is full of cracks and at risk of collapse: reality and objectivity come to be refuted from the realm of words. With the use of language, Asef separates the image from his documentary content and purpose. In each of the videos, the text does not run as a subtitle, but as the title, positioned in the center of the image itself, breaking the hegemony, enthroned in the middle of our field of vision.
While the use of textual-visuals make the ground of the building tremble, irony – an important feature in Asef’s work – completely destroys this building. Heir to the Argentine literary tradition, where the derision on reality allows hyper-real worlds to open that never stop reproducing themselves (Cortazar and Borges), Asef destabilizes images, concepts and categories with which we build the platforms to travel reality. To provoke laughter, Asef allows us to enter a new order of the visual and begin to think the unthinkable.
Mario Asef 