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SAUDADE
A Solo Exhibition by Jacobus Capone
“There is a solemn sadness that dwells here, a regret, a longing to feel without thinking. To forget. To access what could possibly lie beyond the wall of language…”
Jacobus Capone
Curated by Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolsky
1 February – 2 March 2014
Opening 1 February at 17:00 – 20:00
With Live Performance at 20:00
Dark Learning: Act 4 out of 71
Outdoors in front of the Kunstquartier Bethanien
About The Exhibition:
Saudade documents a 13 hour durational performance by Jacobus Capone.
In this “futile exploration into the romantic connotations surrounding peak experience” and the “poetics of place” the artist Jacobus Capone crawled – on bare hands and knees – the entire rocky perimeter of the island of Suomenlinna, Helsinki, blindfolded.
In all of its sincerity, this is a primal and humble gesture in relationship to “Place”. The faint hope guiding the artist’s pursuit towards a more holistic connection, ultimately stands to quell an uneasiness. An uneasiness in relation to the impossibility of a quantifiable engagement with the world. It acknowledges that the more we try to quantify and internalize our position within an environment and the present moment, the more fleeting our existence within it becomes. By putting faith in sensation, the durational act of crawling becomes a process of unburdening, of coming to terms with fact that once the present moment (and one position within it) is intellectualized, it eclipses us. Like many a metaphysician, the artist believes that “we are constantly caught between the false appearance that is accessible, and the reality which is not.”
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EXHIBITION OPENING VIDEO:
About the Artist:
Jacobus Capone is a Perth-based artist working within durational performance, installation, drawing, painting and video. His work’s poetic and humanist intensity focusses on the wholeness of a lived experience tuned to the universal, often by showing how art can address feelings and values of the absurd, futile and transient. These are “small histories of nothing”, as he says, “ephemeral acts/gestures that exert considerable/extended effort – sometimes for no other reason than to exert the effort”, yet always expressing an intense and delicate sincerity, a profound concern with the human condition. Capone has exhibited in Australia, South East Asia, the United States and Europe. For more information, see http://www.jacobuscapone.com
A Word from the Curators
In this most frenzied, rushed, obsessively impatient age, Jacobus Capone presents us with a unique conception of “the art of time”. His durational performances are no feats of “peak performance” issuing in “viral videos” grasping at the viewer’s attention, whose prime challenge is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and whose success is counted in clicks-per-second commanded by red-streaked eyeballs. No. Thankfully, no. This is the work of a poet of time, of a fragile metaphysician of space. How beautiful a match for an art space of the moment – Momentum, a gallery of time-based art.
“Saudade” documents a solitary durational performance on the fortress-island of Suomenlinna. Filmed by the artist’s partner Amy Perejuan Capone over the course of seemingly endless hours over several days, Jacobus Capone came to this work at the conclusion of a three-month residency at HIAP, The Helsinki International Artist Programme. Suomenlinna-Viapori-Sveaborg was a formidable fortress – and today a UNESCO heritage site, positioned at the gates of the port of Helsinki. Its artist-in-residency centre has been home to innumerable renowned artists and curators since the 1970s. In its role as the key buttress of successive empires, thousands of recruits to the Swedish, Russian and now Finnish army and navy, as well as innumerable captives and prisoners have “done time” there. One can be quite sure, however, that none – not artists, soldiers or prisoners – has ever experienced time on these rocky shores in the manner of Jacobus Capone.
As we watch Capone crawl across the storm sharpened and glacier-flattened shelves of stone that gird the island, the place is immortalized in moments of pure perception – timeless time. The resulting footage creates a contemplative, still and meditative space, carved out by a human shape in the universe, “basked in physical futility”.
About the Curators:
Marita Muukkonen has in recent years worked as Curator of HIAP – The Helsinki International Artists-in-Residence Programme and Curator at FRAME-The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, where she was also the Editor of FRAMEWORK -The Finnish Art Review. Between 2001-2005 she worked at NIFCA- The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art. Having worked on several Finnish and Nordic Pavilions at the Venice Biennale, in 2010-2012 she co-curated the 1st Nordic Pavillion for the Daka’art Biennial in Senegal and co-founded Perpetuum Mobilε with Ivor Stodolsky in 2007.
Ivor Stodolsky is a curator, writer and theorist with recent projects in Helsinki (RE-PUBLIC, Kiasma Theatre), Berlin (The 4th Roma-Gypsy Pavilion, .CHB), Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Norway (RE-ALIGNED at www.Re-Aligned.net) and an upcoming thematic exhibition and conference series on the MENA region (ARAB WINTER). He has published in philosophy, art history and cultural theory. With Marita Muukkonen, he is co-founding director of Perpetuum Mobilε: www.PerpetualMobile.org.
Dark Learning: Act 4 out of 71
Dark learning is an ongoing process attempting to integrate all action into the wholeness of one lived experience utilising certain experimental gestures that earnestly strive for the sublime. Under the heading of the title fall multiple acts constituting the project, which is a life long engagement. Through acknowledging the Chinese school of mystery Xuanxue, the project seeks an uncertain equilibrium by means of direct engagement extinguishing all thought and instead puts faith in sensation. Subtle enactments and observations (either brief or durational) become components orchestrating an ongoing journey to better fathom ones relationship to the natural world, and seek a more holistic sense of engagement devoid of direct intellectualization. Unknowing, un learning or forgetting become nuances shaping the project where ones relationship to “things” and the outer realm is hoped to be born anew. Started in 2014, the project will unceasingly be pursued until jacobus’s death.
Act 4 objectively involves the artist kneeling down and simply breathing on a layer of ice beyond the entrance of the Kunstquartier Bethanien. Over the course of 45 minutes the constant act of breathing slowly melts away a section of ice to expose the ground underneath. A single breath then touches the ground and marks the end of the engagement.
PERFORMANCE VIDEO:
