Volte Art Projects is pleased to present Sublime Convergence, an exhibition uniting themes of nature and time through art and technology, to inaugurate the gallery’s new headquarters in Dubai at Alserkal Avenue.
The exhibition explores how technology has increasingly become a lens the natural environment is represented and reimagined through and brings together artists celebrated for their pioneering spirit of innovation, who blur the boundaries between art, design, science and technology. Making use of the gallery’s 8000 square ft of space and heigh ceilings, presented are new and recent large-scale installations across moving image, sculpture and soundscapes, whose compelling visual dialogue connects to give viewers a sense of possibility and awe.
Artists exhibited are: Sheba Chhachhi, Wim Delvoye, Ranbir Kaleka, William Kentridge, Mario Klingemann, Based Upon and Humans since 1982.
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s colossal sculpture Tower stands at nearly 6-metres-high. Created in laser-cut stainless steel with ogival windows, tracery and turrets, the work marries a grandiose neoGothic dream with architectural engineering. Delvoye shows a history of human ambition, merging the intricacy of historical constructions to the immediacy of high-tech visions.
The gallery hosted renowned South African artist William Kentridge’s first solo exhibition in India in 2013. Included in this show is Sibyl, an animated flipbook based on the opera Waiting for the Sibyl, created by Kentridge in 2019 as a companion piece to Alexander Calder’s kinetic work conceived for the stage in 1968, Work in Progress. Kentridge recalls an ancient priestess mentioned by Dante (the Cumean Sibyl), who used to write her prophecies on wind-scattered leaves. A beautiful allegory about our unknown futures, Kentridge’s ink and charcoal drawings on pages shift from the geometric to the figurative.
Stockholm-based Humans since 1982, A million times 120 (Tidal), from The Tidal Series, is a kinetic sculpture that ripples with moving metallic clock-hands in a minute-to-minute recording of the time in 120 gestures. A cross between analogue clocks and digital time-telling, the work forms a natural choreography of cyclical signs against a midnight blue backdrop.
In Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle from Asia, New Delhi-based artist Sheba Chhachhi also draws from ancient mythology and fables, especially that of Garuda, an ancient hybrid figure comprising an eagle and a human. She creates a hypnotic, slow-moving visual essay about flight in a palimpsest of Indian sculpture, Chinese ink painting, Japanese ceramics and Persian miniature, all of which depict the syncretism of spiritual traditions and the ruins of civilization across mountains and cities of Asia. Offering an omniscient view that references the migration of birds, the spread of disease, the movement of Buddhist pilgrims and Chinese TV toys, her sculptural installation of lightboxes and moving images is very much situated in the contemporary.
Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka’s projected videos on painted canvases take the moving image even further, in a multi-layered Surrealist form that combines the technological with the handmade. His work, The Wind of Heaven is that which blows between a Horse's Ears, is a filmic painting in which a solitary man is faced with his own silhouette, the dripping of time and a white horse.
The beginning and ending of the world are interpreted by German artist Mario Klingemann inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which transitions from the birth of humans to paradise before an imagined hell. His new work The Garden of Ephemeral Details Réserve #1 features an AI-derived version of Bosch’s masterpiece, one that is subject to a constant fluidity from a complete re-envisioning of the work to a return to the original painting. Klingemann has created a new iteration of this work for the exhibition in six videos that link AI imagery of a living garden and hybrid forms to Bosch’s surreal universe. A leading pioneer in AI-art and Google Arts and Culture resident, Klingemann uses a suite of algorithms and neural networks to produce his visual experiences in real time, having trained an AI model on Bosch’s work to create a dialogue with the iconic painting in the present.
London-based collective Based Upon presents a suite of works for this exhibition, shown for the first time in the UAE. Included is a spectacular hand-sculpted working grand piano of fluid curves - The Baby. The work features the twist, a sculptural form and the result of nine years of design evolution, developed through exploring repeating spiral patterns in nature. If I had Known Then What I Know Now maps the rugged outlines of the UAE in a dramatic topography that is both a solid bronze cast and a comment on the value of abandoned ideas, evoking and elevating the status of crumpled notes as afterthoughts. Blow magnifies this gesture in an intricate wall sculpture and III is a portal-like meditative landscape in limestone that includes oscillating sound and lighting. The artists describe it as an attempt to capture breath within landscape. Both tech-responsive and primitive in form, its surface draws from the 350-million-year-old landscape of Inis Oirr, Ireland, using 3D scans with film and drone photography.
In the connections between human and technological states of being there is emancipatory potential - the exhibition urges us to think of a precarious geography (artistic, virtual, natural) in flux and the role we play in its shaping.
