Is it Real?
The exhibition wants to be a reflection on the labile border between reality and fiction. In a world in which everything becomes representation, where the reality is endlessly reproducible through screens, we are completely immersed in a space hyper-real argues Jean Baudrillard. This term refers to the virtual or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption. We live in a world dominated by simulated experience and feelings, Baudrillard believes, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it really exists. We only experience prepared realities - edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution of "referendum." In Baudrillard's words: "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation."
(photo by marco giani)
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the Real itself.
The work presented in the exhibition by Marco Giani, Italian artist who lives and works in Berlin, plays on the border between the reality and simulation: altered photographs, videos and objects belonging to the sphere of reality they become something else. Where does the fiction ends and starts the real? What's more real then an image sourced from the web?
Elena Bellantoni, Italian artist who lives and works in Berlin, works on the idea of playing with images sourced from fashion newspapers. The artist presents a series of models portraits, is a work on the view. "The gaze" becomes the threshold for the access to another reality, a sort of Alice passing through the Looking-Glass.
