by Alex Vermeulen
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
20 Januari - 3 march 1996
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is organizing an exhibition for January-March of 1996: Fuga Futuri, in which new work by the visual artist Alex Vermeulen will be shown.
Since 1982 this artist has been carrying out projects in which he experiments with hybrids of such varied media as sculpture, photography, permanent and temporary installations, theater, film and performances.
The theme of the project Fuga Futuri deals with the factor time and the experience of time.
But what is time? Time is power. Time is space. Time is an abstract notion, which cannot be reduced to a single common denominator. The consistency of the clock is merely an imperfect compromise. As a consequence of the disease, the objective reading of time gives way to a subjective experience of time. In Terra Refrigera, where everything is arranged down to the least detail, a deluded reality unfolds.
Fuga Futuri is the story of an imaginary city Terra Refrigera, built beneath the ice cap of Antarctica, in which an artificial climate has been created. In this city everything is organized through government channels. The artificial lighting, for instance, goes on and shuts off at fixed times.
The city is stricken by an epidemic: a mysterious virus affects the brains of the inhabitans, the result being that they develop telepathic sensitivity. After a while the inhabitants realize that the only potential for privacy lies with their feelings and intuition; the heart does not speak in thoughts. Instincts are sharpened, forced by the circumstances of the disease. Emotion becomes superoir to intellect.
A catalogue will be published in connection with the exhibition; the texts, by Rudi Fuchs and others, provide insight into Alex Vermeulen's specific way of working.
As part of the catalogue the artist will produce a filmbook, thus completing his series of five previous "filmbooks" in terms of form and content.
The new filmbook Fuga Futuri and the catalogue will appear during the exhibition. Naturally, the organizations who contribute to the realization of the project will be mentioned in the catalogue.
Alex Vermeulen creates works which, aside from their autonomous existence as works of art, are placed in films, staged photography and installations. The works do not serve as props but, partly due to their interactive capacities, play key roles within the mise en scène.
In his new project, Fuga Futuri, the artist brings an alienation of reality by means of perspectival manipulations (in space and in time). By doing this he operates on the limits of the plausible, where photography suggets the existence of a frozen moment. Until recently, photography was regarded as objective proof of an event. But with present-day computer techniques, which make anything possible, this has been brought into question. Through a convergence of artist Alex Vermeulen's characteristic way of working and the latest computer techniques, a hallucinatory reality, true to the content, takes shape in Fuga Futuri.
