A Solo Exhibition by 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
“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
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.”
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
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.
