“The Hole And The Receptive” is a group-exhibition co-curated by Bianca Chu, that includes Covey Gong, Joanne Burke, Jeffery Camp, Lenz Geerk, Derek Jarman, and Paul Thek.

The exhibition takes its title from the writings of Sufi mystic, musician and trainer Hazrat Inayat Khan: “Life is rather like the ocean. When there isn’t any appreciation, no receptivity, [one] sinks like a bit of iron to the underside of the ocean. [One] can’t float just like the boat which is hole, which is receptive.” (Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music, 1991, p. 132)

In Olaf Stapledon’s seminal 1937 novel, Starmaker, the protagonist travels to a different world the place mollusc-like creatures “purchase a propensity to float in [their] boatlike shell on the ocean’s floor.” Their our bodies ultimately evolve so a “crude sail” emerges from the membrane of its again, making these beings apt at navigation; they develop into “dwelling ships.” The nautiloids, because the protagonist in Starmaker names the species, have advanced to be in tune with the ocean, dwelling harmoniously with its ebbs and flows. Our protagonist, gifted with the ability of embodying any being’s perspective, with out interference on the host, is subsequently capable of recount with exact element and authenticity, these nautiloids’ emotions, sensations, and experiences, as they’re unfolding. As readers, we’re afforded the chance to understand via their “eyes,” “to style the bitter or scrumptious currents . . . to listen to the sea-bottom’s configuration via the echoes that it forged as much as the under-water ears.” The idea of an inanimate factor—be it a ship, a cheese grater, or a doorknob—as a sentient, clever lifeform might take a look at the elasticity of 1’s perceiving thoughts and but, the very chance of imagining it means in some place, some dimension, it’s actual. To be hole and receptive is to carve open house for the suspension of disbelief in no matter type it seems sovereign to the beholder.

I’ve typically puzzled if these nautiloids may be the beings that Sufi mystic, trainer and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan conceived of in his profound anthology, The Mysticism of Sound and Music, when he wrote: “Life is rather like the ocean. When there isn’t any appreciation, no receptivity, [one] sinks like a bit of iron to the underside of the ocean. [One] can’t float just like the boat which is hole, which is receptive.” Inayat Khan suggests as human beings if we might embody the buoyancy of a ship, we’d sail via the huge, ever-changing and sometimes turbulent ocean of life with equanimity and ease. Stapledon’s protagonist describes the nautiloids, drifting and coursing via rolling waves, as possessing intelligence, want and concern–they, like all of the alien species within the novel, are foils of humanity, highlighting elements of our humanity in order a reader, you would possibly interrogate your self and on the similar time, really feel recognition with (an)different. What can we glean from our sea-faring alien buddies’ speculative type? To be hole and receptive will not be merely a structural and organic benefit in some worlds, in a while, it’s a means of being that allows house for progress. Actually a void or gap, it’s to empty oneself with the intention to settle for new views and concepts into one’s worldview. In my opinion, this can be a profound invitation, and it’s from this orientation that this exhibition has been conceived.

The opening shot of Derek Jarman’s 1972 Super8 movie, At Low Tide, a cargo ship glides silently throughout the horizon till it disappears from the cinematic body. As watchers we’re left gazing on the ocean and sky, a primordial assembly of matter and air, an summary tableau. Within the following six minutes, a sea-deity seems on rocks, swathed in color, its face an angular, futuristic masks fabricated from metallic silver. Our deity edges down, ultimately embracing a siren who’s wanting over a useless sailor while she casts makeshift paper boats into a relaxed tidal pool. In Philip Hoare’s current essay on this quick movie, he writes that “nothing actually occurs, nothing is resolved, all the pieces is recommended,” which looks like a promising mantra for a way to withstand the temptation to narrativise. To withstand this urge is to resign the constraints of 1 singular story, one dominant model of historical past. By means of that act of renunciation, to decide on multiplicity, contradiction, even paradox; to decide on different potentialities, different realities the place boats are sentient beings, to be empty in order to be full, at the very least in metaphysical phrases. Hoare continues on the magic of Jarman’s Super8 movies: “of their ghostly slowness, they join us bodily with [a] fluid age of change and potentialities.” We’re ever in a fluid age of change and chance, of changing into.

This exhibition presents a speculation: is it attainable for artistic acts to harness the phantasm of illustration/realism with the intention to make actual and tangible that which is tough to decipher absolutely, ineffable, that which endures within the hole? The artists introduced collectively listed here are every nodes in an enormous internet of relations–between folks, locations, issues, and concepts–who, for me, are exemplars of an enquiry into the inexpressible, the poetic, even the arcane. Their works supply signposts in direction of the receptive: what a brief suspension of disbelief does, right here within the type of visible and materials artwork follow, and the way their silent echoes reverberate if we select to attune to them as they go via us. The Starmaker’s protagonist on the finish of his recounting of his expertise inside a nautiloid host notes solely when ‘all of the loopy traditions of a diseased civilisation had been purged away, together with true tradition, might the spirit of those “ship-[beings] [sic.] set out once more on the good journey of the spirit. Many hundreds of years later it broke via on to that greater aircraft of being . . . ” What different dimension of being turns into obtainable, what portal is opened when the receptive and the hole meet in a panorama, in a physique, on the ocean’s floor and its unfathomable abyss?

—Bianca Chu

Co-curated by
Bianca Chu

Collaborating artists:
Covey Gong, Joanne Burke, Jeffery Camp, Lenz Geerk, Derek Jarman, and Paul Thek.

at ADZ Gallery, Lisbon
till June 27, 2024