MAGIC MIRROR
Video art event – VII-th edition
21-22 May 2016
h 19.00- 01.00

Visualcontainer as partner of Magic Mirror, it’s proud to present a special installative videoart selection at Oradea Fortress in the frame of the event and during the Night of Museums in Oradea, also.

Moreover the best of Magic Mirror will be presented at [.BOX] videoart project space from 9 to 19 of June and on VisualcontainerTV International Videoart Webchannel

Artists selected: “The Flying Sisters” aka Sonia Armaniaco – Maria Korporal – – Lino Strangis – Marta Roberti – Barbara Brugola & Trond Arne Vangen – Rita Casdia – Yuri Pirondi + Ines von Bonhorst – Katharina Gruzei – Micol Roubini + Lorenzo Casali

“Associating the mirror with the reason has been an intensive subject of philosophic debate since Antiquity. According to Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC – 27 BC), some legends tell about magic mirrors of Persian origins, that could reflect the future. Nowadays the fascination of mirrors and their multiple realities are treated with the same interest by science, art, literature, philosophy, psychology and anthropology.

– Metaphorically, the contemporary man is a mirror of his time; the different faces of the surrounding reality are mirrored in our minds and causing reactions that stimulate imagination with reflections in science, culture and art. We know that the Mirror multiplies the image of the reality not only metaphysically. It is used also in pragmatic purposes, in the new technologies of producing energy, in telescopes and lasers, in architecture to decorate spaces, as well as for personal care.

-The artist can make more of this multiplication through video images that are reflected by the viewer’s mental (virtual) mirror, raising questions that make reality deeper, thus reflecting possible worlds that admit contradictory images and the recovery of a potential infinite.

– The artist’s dynamic and speculative thinking will develop the daily images that reflect normality and will recompose and recontextualize them by attaching new meanings to them. Thus they acquire unsuspected dimensions inside the recreated video image, similar to mirror images. These remakes of daily images stimulate imagination and initiates assumptions, ideas, judgement, abstracts reality, embellishes it, makes it uglier or magical.

-This multiplication at the level of the image does not always suppose a logical, chaotic inadequacy but may lead to metaphysical questions and challenges the mind of those who mentally operate with these symbolic images (artist or viewer); it is a seek for lucidity, self-consciousness, inner confession and it diminishes the unsecured line between imagination and reality, leading to reverie, grace and beauty.

-Paradoxically, these images can be transformed into excess. The broken mirror multiplies and turns everything uglier and gives complicated, unintelligible images where logical thinking can become absent in order to free itself from the blurred, tiring and schizophrenic content of the images.

-In this twisted, incoherent world of images, intuition and previous experience helps the liberation from the fake world of duplicity where parallel identities are created as if in a show that can be mistaken as the reality that plays as model.

This kind of unreal, parallel, faked image is present today in the virtual world, in the avatars built in video games, in creating the profile for different social networks, in advertising, in creating political/cultural profiles, in the Selfie phenomenon that can be associated with the myth of Narcissus, which reflects an image of such beauty and seduction that fascinates the person that owns it, becoming a symbol of selfishness and vanity.

The mirror that reflects the inverse, parallel, deformed, oversized, multiplied, always seductive image, can be interpreted in two ways: as an alienation from the divine principles, nature, the essence of life, consciousness; on the other hand, it may have positive connotations in the sense of regaining some invisible values, of introspection and spiritual purification; it is an image that can reflect the world’s future if we use the information offered by the mirror in a wise way.”
By Curator and Associate Professor Dr. Gabriela Diana Bohnstedt Gavrilaș

Visualcontainer’s selection:

“The Flying Sisters” aka Sonia Armaniaco – Maria Korporal Heart-earth, 5:00, 2013
Lino Strangis – Metaphysical orogeny – 7.44, 2016
Marta Roberti – Scarabocchio, 3:00, 2015
Barbara Brugola & Trond Arne Vangen – Pic nic , 8.00, 2015
Rita Casdia – Life skin, 2:28, 2015
Yuri Pirondi + Ines von Bonhorst – Void Shades – 10:00, 2012
Katharina Gruzei – Dialoge I – IV,9’45, 2008/09
Micol Roubini e Lorenzo Casali – Green Gold , 13’40”, 2012

Special thanks to: Dr. Gabriela Diana Bohnstedt Gavrilaș and Dr. Aurel Chiriac

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