We invite you to visit the experimental exhibition Monster Abyss, created by Pablo Ramírez González, a member of our Doctoral School.
The virtual exhibition can be viewed on the Kunstmatrix platform until December 30, 2021, at: https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/6936660/monster-abyss
Dark tarry matter fills the white space. It slowly mutates and turns into a network of interspecies debate, giving familiar shapes a new, disturbing context. It wakes us up from one realm, and sucks us into another. The potentiality of these beings opposes clear dichotomies. The resultant imaginarium contains an element of dissent with the one only, hegemonic version of history. In this world of uncertainty, well-established patterns of constructing statements are denied.
The Monster Abyss exhibition explores the boundaries of the subject of monstrosity, its intricacies and paradoxes. It examines existing narratives around this topic and places them in a nexus of colonial, geopolitical, and economic forces. Furthermore, it tries to put into question the figure of "the other" constructed by Western culture and highlight the interrelations between species, nature and the matter of their agency.
The exhibition investigates monstrosity as a colonial taxonomy. Created on the basis of opposition to what is seen as human, it contains all our fears and fantasies. This category works as an index of anthropos status not only in terms of appearance but also in terms of ethics and morality. That is why the notion of monstrosity is often used as a tool of ideology, in the language of racism, discrimination, or speciesism. Signifying specific human and non-human forms of life as monstrous gives an excuse for exploitation and abuse.
The works of Pablo Ramirez Gonzalez investigates the intermingling of contrasting narrations reflecting on politics, consumerism, and side-effects of our utopian, futuristic dream of success in a world of disparities. When creating a story about exclusion, Ramirez is deconstructing the monster figure recorded in hegemonic discourse. This process serves as a testimony of necropolitical and ostracizing threads, still strongly present in contemporary reality.
Aleksandra Kubacka (curator)
info. dr hab. J. Jernajczyk
Dean of the Doctoral School
