Taylor Macklin

Against the Sun
24.7. – 24.8.2014
Luis Albisser and Mathias Renner, Maya Deren, Cédric Eisenring, Brigit Naef, Nick Oberthaler, and Ian Wooldridge; with the help of Beck Books, Louisa Gagliardi, and Martin Jaeggi.

Against the Sun is an exhibition in an environment. The title can be read both literally and metaphorically: The show will indeed take place within a shuttered apartment at the height of summer, while it explores the night and realms that escape the glaring sun of reason.

Reminiscent of both an opium den and a nightclub, the show invites the viewer into an artificial night, a room for reflection, sheltered from the sun's panoptic eye. A projection of Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen. The Living Gods of Haiti serves as a starting point for various avenues of thoughts that are explored in film playlists and displays of books.

"The ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. The intent of such depersonalization is not the deconstruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of personality. He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning," Maya Deren wrote in An Anagram on Art, Form, and Film. This voluntary loss of self, so contrary to rationalism and work ethics, is explored in the kaleidoscopic selection of films, books and artworks under various aspects: Ritual, trance, the night, popular music, night clubbing, occulture, and art.