passage
City gallery of Bratislava
Pálffy Palace
Panská 19, Bratislava
The "Passage" represents a kind of symbolic "short cut across
the world" in which we exist or dwell: through the factual, real world
into the world of human culture, where reality is exchanged for another
- virtual - reality, for the reality of word, text, sign, symbol, image,
and back again.
The project itself is a metaphorical synthesis of a number of formal semantic
elements: an entrance, a path, "endless walls" of books, mirrors,
light, an exit and even the physical presence of the viewers themselves.
Here, viewers change from "passive" observers into actors that
help form the work's symbolic and semantic aspects. Their physical presence
is converted into an image - an "image of the walkers" stepping
through the passage and simultaneously an "image of the pilgrims"
walking along a narrow path through "infinite" space. These metaphorical
sources reveal for a moment the possibility of "glimpsing" that
hidden, inconceivable yet omnipresent "world-flow".
Despite its essentially discrete present, the Passage becomes an obstacle,
and simultaneously the sole possibility of movement in the space of the
gallery or the world, and thereby reflects another aspect of that "flow"
- the absence of any other alternatives...
Matej Kren
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