In his famous last interview, Bruce Lee used water as a metaphor for the ability of humans to adjust to all situations in life. “Empty your mind”, he said, “be formless, shapeless —like water. (...) Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend” (1971). This ambivalence of water —being the primeval source of life but also the bearer of change, destruction and death— is the idea behind the fourth cápsula.
Water as a common thread flows among the artworks of this show, going from the symbolic to the most tangible aspects of it, such as the environment, its links to science and technology, and our future on Earth.
Like oceans, those multilayered bodies of water from which we usually only see the surface, our Western way of thinking, based in the concept of progress, entails numerous layers of sediments, meanings and consequences. Some developments derived from progress have flowed, improving quality of human life, but some have also crashed, generating ruins and victims.
This ambivalence of water is portrayed and explored in the documentary Kings of Nowhere by filmmaker Betzabé García —awarded the Golden Eye Best International Documentary at the Zurich Film Festival in 2015. The film narrates life in a partially submerged town in northwestern Mexico, a place that, despite the destruction caused by water, three families refuse to leave.
Adding layers to the already complex issues posed by the film, Angela Baumgartner and Pascal Sidler’s artworks explore alternative perspectives regarding technology and its relation to life.
Angela Baumgartner’s Chasing Rainbows II produces an artificial rainbow for times of drought, where water is not available. Her work brings the atmospheric phenomenon indoors, without the need of water but using only physics and optics. Conversely, in her video Dolphin 2000, water is abundant, but its inhabitants are not organic.
Scales and layers structure Pascal Sidler’s series of small paintings titled European Southern Observatory, where high-end technology images overlap with depictions of wild plants growing throughout the surface of the canvas, even in a three-dimensional way. Water is nowhere visible but would appear to be the force that made plants grow. In his large format painting Handbild 1, everyday technology is reduced to a small motif that multiplies creating a pattern on top of two previous layers portraying organic elements in different scales.
From the tangible to the intangible, the works in the show go with the flow. Empty your mind and be water, my friend.
The artists will be present.