REYKJAVIK, ICELAND.- Kling&Bang Gallerí presents the first Icelandic solo exhibition of Alejandro Vidal. Featuring a selection of video and photographic works set within ensconced spaces, these works will meet head-on the order of the white (in this case black) cube and constraints of the light (in this case dark) at the end of the tunnel, eclipsing every rule of engagement.
In the single-channel installation Material Dust (2006), the artist surreptitiously overlays his own enigmatic narrative with real-time footage of film production. Behind-the-scenes becomes the scene itself as a trancelike move throughout the labyrinth of Hong Kong evokes the cinematic legends of that city.
The photographic series Negotiating a new economy lethal paradise (2006) evoke the feral histories nurtured by such underground classics of Asian cinema. Where gangsters are today’s young warriors, violent death becomes a ritual and value systems carry a high price worth defending. These works are poised upon the threshold of degeneration—the instinct entire civilizations hinge upon, a sense of the potential for absolute death.
Tactical Disorder (2006) questions the relationship between policies of security and the culture of fear. Through a nearly anti-gravitational study of combat, much in the way a frequently used word gradually loses meaning the conditions under which physical conflict is socially accepted and cultivated are brought under close scrutiny. The increasing number of security measures driving us into a "post-political” scenario, thereby shifting the political register away from the guiding principles and trusted personages of the State, imply that politics emerge through lifestyle, art, and discourse.
At this point it is nearly impossible to discern the varying political technologies of control and regulation.
Extracting concentrated imagery from a sensorial recurring dream or contemporary parable for daily tests of the human condition, Vidal localizes examples of larger formulas at play: the lack of communication, methodological entropy, and limited political emancipation of our time.
