- Adriana Blidaru
Artists: Jenny Holzer, Porpentine & Neotenomie, Hayley Silverman, and Slavs and Tatars
The term Mother lode comes from the vocabulary of American mining. Originating from the discipline of geology, it means ‘an abundant source’ and refers to a vein-like deposit of precious metal that is situated between the layers of an ore. This rock is mined and further processed in order to obtain valuable minerals.
The exhibition takes its start from this geological concept in order to consider the sedimentation of language as a kind of mother lode, in how language is extracted, used, mediated, and is itself situated between interacting layers of time, space and human relationships.
The common playground of language is what brings these four artists in the exhibition together. Slavs and Tatars, Hayley Silverman, Porpentine and Neotenomie, and Jenny Holzer, all work on breaking the patterns of how communication is used, received, and how it is visually organized. Their practices disrupt its standard forms of logic, linearity and correlation between words and things.
The collective Slavs and Tatars conducts research-based projects, which reflect on how language is translated and how it evolves, especially in relation to the politics, history and popular culture of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
The artist Hayley Silverman performances weave inter-faith, interspecies, multi -layered modes of being, in order to provide a space in which one can contemplate and re-imagine powerful vectors of cultural transmission. Her practice seeks to expand, refashion, and exorcise pre-existing fables of self- hood.
The game developers and writers Porpentine and Neotenomie design interactive storytelling platforms that allow players to construct their own narrative by steering their experience through nodes of hypertext.
The artist Jenny Holzer depicts, discloses, and subverts the existing politics of language’s discursive structures.
Mother lode releases language from its fossilized condition by breaking apart how it makes sense or represents the world. The goal is to favor its use as an indeterminate and open-ended device, with which one could find a new potential for restructuring knowledge.
