Poetic Intention
Notes is a series of short-form photo-essays on art and thoughts in orbit.
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Notes is a series of short-form photo-essays on art and thoughts in orbit. 〰️
2 November 2024
Pairing artworks by aesthetic similarities alone in group exhibitions can provide a seamless experience but it can also lead to shallow relationships. If done well, this approach can lead the exhibition visitor to ideas that they might not have otherwise considered. I found this to be the case when encountering a pairing of works by artists Dora García and Oussama Tabti in the collection exhibition Prelude. Poetic Intention at MACBA in Barcelona.
García’s work documents and recreates books from the Joycean Society, a group who meet to analyse the entirety of Finnegans Wake page by page and line by line. A film documents one such society gathering with its members dissecting Joyce’s intentions, mining each word as if it were a clue in a cryptic crossword. Alongside the film, García presents a free standing blackboard with cypher-like symbols written in white chalk and on a table are news paper clippings and heavily annotated copies of Finnegans Wake – facsimiles of society members’ own books.
Oussama Tabti’s work couldn't be more different. Yes once again books are represented but it is the absence of information that makes the books in Tabti’s work significant. Tabti presents us with a grid of photographs each depicting the library issue stamps inside book covers. We are not shown any book titles or any other conventional content. Instead, we must turn to the wall label. It informs us that the dates stamped in these books reveal a 6 year gap in borrowing which correlates with the “victory of radical Islamists in 1994 and the subsequent coup d’état by the Algerian army” during which the library was closed. Through this exhibition placement, books become more than the objects themselves. They become indexes to everything beyond their pages.
