Herczka
Mediamatic started the new season with two exhibitions. A series of photographs by Shunji Hori and a video installation by Mateusz Herczka.
In the experiments of artist Shunji Hori (NL/JP 1967) art, science and philosophy fuse into an alternative vision of the real. Although these fields in their specific ways alter the way we see and interact with reality it is through the development of certain digital technologies that it becomes possible to really connect them.
At Mediamatic’s Groundfloor Hori showed a series of very detailed portraits of builders, reminiscent of gigantic passport or I.D. photos. But this simplicity is deceiving. The portraits represented the ambivalent synthesized reality that originated from superimposing two different surfaces: a second skin, belonging to the artist, is precisely drafted onto the face of the 6 sitters.
The manipulated result remained so close to what we already know that it actually inconspicuously replaces reality. Only when the photographs were read in relation to one another the intended act becomes clear: a new reality, denying the quest for individual self-definition, is about to take center stage.
