Dia-logos [Universal dualities of life and death]

Death is ever present in the human condition as a silent and intimate dialogue. From Nature Morte to Vanitas, the audacity of the artist brings this dialogue to the world, thereby exposing across cultures the universality of the human condition.

Dia-logos aims at depicting the particular encounter and dialog between the world of the Living and the world of the Dead in which the vanishing voices and images of memory and the abstract visions of the future percolate through our world, challenging and transfiguring our perceptions.

Within this transfiguration of our perceptions, facing a new temporal horizon, endowed and cleared with a renewed vision of existence, we welcome the gift made by death to living persons, “Eternal life, that is to say, the indelible act of having been” and we stand in the now appeased contemplation of our and all selves, embracing in one single movement, life and death.

The subtly disturbing praxis of Myrna Quiñonez reveals this vision: The flesh-tones and blurred boundaries and contours of her subjects, render visible the conflictual dialogue of the past, present and future. Myrna carefully cultivates the process of remembering as a means of overcoming decay and disappearance.

Nullpixel utilizes data from institutional databases concerning deaths and homicides, where each individual human being is abstracted to a number. This data is then interpreted by an audio-visual system to recreate a living yet fleeting landscape; thereby creating a symbolic burial and returning these beings to ashes.

The combination of these works create a mixed state of contemplation and distraction for the spectator, proposing a broader and sophisticated vision of the intimate relationship to death and the collective systems of representations of death.

Dia-logos creates the context for the emergence of the enhanced vision of human condition that initiates with the momento mori.

Curated for The Doce18 Concept House by Frank & Lee Dufour for Agence5970 and Dr. Reynaldo Thompson

Vladimir Jankélévitch. La Mort. Flammarion. Paris, France.1966

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