Ritual without Myth, Danai Anesiadou, Asco, Erick Beltrán, Lygia Clark, Patrizio Di Massimo, Joachim Koester, Ioana Nemes, Ocaña, Amalia Pica, Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Royal College of Art, 8 until 25 March 2012, Henry Moore Gallery, London, UK
This exhibition brings together practices that revisit the idea of RITUAL as a catalyst for transformative experience; a notion explored in the work of Lygia Clark (‘I manipulate the rite without the myth’). Her work, which existed only through the agency and subjective experience of an audience, acts as a point of departure from which to re-examine the function of ritual today. By exploring ritual as medium, Clark shifts the focus from the field of the spiritual to patterns of social interaction, creating potential for the production of alternative forms of subjectivity.
This exhibition brings together practices that interrogate MYTH as a set of beliefs that sustain our social structures. In the works presented, different bodies of culture are devoured and devour in turn; a strategy that can be related to the concept of antropofagia (the cannibalisation of culture, as first defined within Brazilian avant-gardes). Rather than incorporating the other, this process involves a transformation, a becoming. Devouring mythologies allows the possibility of re signifying them, in order to decentre the colonial, social and sexual norms that constitute modernity...