Abstract
"No one thinks spontaneously about a plastic art of destruction. Yet destruction too is formative.
A smashedup face is still a face, a stump a limb, a traumatized psyche remains a psyche. Destruction has its own sculpting tools," writes French philosopher Catherine Malabou in her book The Ontology of the Accident.
In it, she reflects on the transformative power of phenomena we commonly think of as disruptive - but destruction, deviation, failure, trauma, incision, discard, expiration, loss, crisis, aging, or even death are in fact constantly transforming the world. They change the shape of bodies, objects and ideas, which yield to their pressure with disturbing malleability.
The joint exhibition of French artist Laura Gozlan and Slovak artist Šimon Chovan takes up these modeling tools of "destructive plasticity", testing through sculpture and moving image the integrity of bodies and the recognizability of (social) forms. Can we be sure of what we see and hear? Are we outside or are we within? Where lies the boundary between intimate and public? And what hides in the bowels beneath the solid surface of the pavement?