Modern Times, a History of the Machine
Grand Palais, Paris
March 26 - 29, 2015
The installation Modern Times consists in a luminous and kinetic projection that takes place outside on city buildings, or indoors on the walls of artistic exhibition spaces. It shows a large and complex geometric composition combining rotating circles, crossing lines, circular calligraphic motifs and linguistic symbols: Arab letters with their universal phonetic transcription. The piece comes with a soundtrack of variably piercing acoustic distortions.
Modern Times tackles the notion of the machine as it’s been shaped since the Industrial Revolution and the apparition of increasingly complex and automated tools. It not only questions the reversal of relations between man and machine during the industrial era that allowed the machine to evolve from a utilitarian function to a form of domination and control over individuals, it also questions the notion and its polysemy: tool, heterogeneous assemblage producing an effect in the widest sense, modeling of the fantasmatic capacities of humans, poetic and metaphoric designation of the world itself. Lastly, it participates in the foundation of an esthetic figure that is central to Mounir Fatmi’s artistic universe, that of the machine.
One of the characteristics of Mounir Fatmi’s mechanics is to multiply and associate extremely diverse elements: Duchamp’s rotoreliefs and calligraphic motifs that rotate like cogs, geometric shapes and linguistic symbols. It constitutes an experimental apparatus capable of transcribing complex cultural interactions. His esthetic of profuseness also tends to create a double effect of fascination and confusion in the viewer. His shapes are seductive while at the same time they challenge visual points of reference and one’s capacity for shape recognition and interpretation. As for his sound installation, it challenges the public’s audition.
The history of the machine as told by Mounir Fatmi underlines the danger of the subordination of individuals to its power, as they become reduced to mere gearwheels. Yet Mounir Fatmi’s machine constitutes an image of the modern world and a plastic construction allowing us to conceive an environment in perpetual evolution. It encourages viewers to make the necessary effort to associate signs in order to renew their relation to reality. A language of light and pure poetry, a fantasy of total art as illustrated in the orphic paintings of the Delaunay couple, the hereby-created machine invents a new language capable of expressing the complexity of the world and its movement.
Studio Fatmi, August 2017
