Opening Gallery is pleased to announce Collective Brain, a group exhibition of works by Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis, Veronique Bourgoin, Alexandros Georgiou, Mat Chivers, Raúl Cordero, Yioula Hadjigeorgiou, Steven C. Harvey, Peggy Kliafa, Artemis Kotioni, Jessica Mitrani, Paula Meninato, Eleni Mylonas, Margarita Myrogianni, Warren Neidich, Alexander Polzin, Dan Reisner, Juli Susin, Dimitris Tragkas, Adonis Volanakis, Hans Weigant, Vasilis Zarifopoulos curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. Installed across the first floor of 42 Walker St, Collective Brain attempts to challenge our perception of mental processes with an arrangement of corporeally provoking art pieces, connecting artists who work in divergent media and are convening from diverse localities.
Contemplating the notion of the mind as a mechanism – a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation – Collective Brain offers different viewpoints about the brain and its million neurons by centering neurodiversity as the fundamental concept about how we can understand the physical and biological origins of human emotion in the brain, as well as the conception, exhibition, and reception of the artworks. A section of the exhibition also attempts to comprehend and challenge perceptions about the operations of the non-human brain.
The revolutionary field of optogenetics allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light, however, we still seem to know little about the human mind and certain theorists argue that it is much too complicated to be controlled, while brain and electrostimulation experiments of the 60s and 70s were often unable to clarify which parts of the brain are stimulated by stimoceivers or electro-magnetic radiation.
Further to the notion of mind control, current scientific research attempts to illuminate the biological nature of our inner worlds and our “projections” namely the ways aspects of the self are experienced by the individual as residing outside the self (Deisseroth K.). Drawing from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, and his claim that “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make humans the true masters of creation, that their most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of their own brain,” the exhibition attempts to trace the visualization of the brain's inner circuitry with a deep empathy for mental illness.
Cajal ventured into science as both an artist and a pathologist, while he became the first person to see a neuron. The scientist visualized the inner workings of the mind with thousands of stunning pen-and-ink diagrams and his exquisite, meticulous drawings of neurons in the brain and spinal cord proved that every neuron in the brain is separate and that neurons communicate across synapses.
There is an on-going parallel between the ‘visualization of the brain’ in the scientific and in the artistic domains and a fascination with the visualization of the neurons, but how can this visualization help us understand the invisible synapses of the collective brain and especially the ways human societies can resist mind control with actual free will.
This September, Curators Chiara Mannarino and Francesca Pessarelli present Impressions of the Flowers Themselves, which takes botanist and cyanotype photographer Anna Atkins’ deep connection and consideration for her botanical subjects as its point of departure. Alina Bliumis, Joseph Liatela, and Joey Rosin align with this empathic relationship to plants and, each in a different way, address the symbolic potential of flowers and their ability to evoke ideas of rebirth, transformation, and utopia.
Bliumis is a research-based artist who approaches historical and political moments through the lens of the natural world. In her series Endangered: Portraits of Flowers, Bliumis gives renewed life and agency to endangered and extinct flowers through portraiture. Hand-carved frames imbue these plants with a sense of personhood and reflect the histories and mythologies associated with them. Many of the flowers Bliumis includes in this series have medicinal or psychedelic properties – their healing and transportive capabilities often leading to their exploitation and extinction.
Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist who uses performance and sculpture to address trans and queer subjectivities and embodiment. His work considers the historical use of flowers in memorials and their inherent symbolism of death and rebirth. In his installation Untitled (Ascension), Liatela applies these concepts to the body, addressing the transitory nature shared by plants and humans and one’s ability to transform over time. His work serves as an altar upon which we commemorate the individuals and parts of ourselves we have lost while looking towards the infinite potential of the reborn self.
Rosin is a musician, sound healer, and budding scent artist. In line with Bliumis’ and Liatela’s exploration of ephemerality and loss, Rosin has created a four-piece sonic landscape entitled Bardo – a Tibetan word that describes the liminal space between death and rebirth. Also by Rosin is Altarpiece – a unique fragrance that will be diffused throughout the exhibition space. Rosin has poetically conceptualized these works as a metaphorical diptych. Harnessing the evocative nature of scent and sound, Rosin’s aim is to encapsulate the beauty of a natural world that no longer exists and will never exist again.
Born in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment, during which historically prevailing notions of the self came into question, Anna Atkins turned such inquiries to the botanical world as well, considering how flora, too, can constitute moral agents. Impressions of the Flowers Themselves seeks to blur and make arbitrary the line between human and botanical life, speaking to the impossibility of extricating ourselves and our ideals from the natural world and its mythologies. The exhibition will act as an altar, a memorial, a meditative space where we can imagine an alternate present, one in which we haven’t lost these literal and figurative flowers and the stories and values they carry with them.
Boris Groys Excerpt from Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art, The James Gallery and e-flux, New York "Jeff and Alina Bliumis, a pair of New York-based, Russian-speaking artists born in Moldova and Belarus, respectively, also open themselves up to the potentialities of new landscapes in the work that produced an installation of thirty-nine 24 x 24 inch photographs at The James Gallery. For their long-term project A Painting for a Family Dinner (2008-2013), the Bliumis' traveled the world from The Bronx to China stopping in Italy and Israel, looking for hosts who would exchange a home-cooked meal for a small sweetly but primitively rendered painting. Their project, which is the only one in the exhibition that does not directly engage with Russia, is documented through photographs where they stand with their temporarily adoptive families and in a set of limited-edition books that trace the project's steps within each country. Reviving the barter system in the twenty-first century when our transactions have advanced to new currencies, like Bitcoins and devices like Apple Pay, the Bliumis' humble proposition is inspiring, even though its success is not guaranteed in the capitalist system. A Painting for a Family Dinner allows us to see a positive side of communism because it puts into practice the notion of equal and shared property circulating within an international codependent community".
