Plateau Aurora Borealis Mark Titchner
Past Exhibitions exhibition
Press release
Javier Peres is pleased to present Mark Titchner's first solo show with Peres Projects in Berlin, in which the Plateau Aurora Borealis has descended upon the entire gallery space. A type of future lieu de memoire, the exhibition furthers the artist's interest in the metaphysics of text, sound, and aesthetics. Like the artist's signature placative lightboxes that make large proclamations of paradoxically ambiguous, decontextualized found language, or his "wish amplifiers", which give concrete form to intangible desires, Mark Titchner's new body of sculptural work continues to mine the aesthetics of the progressive left and an arcane stylization of post-history.
Living ghosts preside over the gallery in the shape of large-scale silk-screened portraits of aging, former world leaders overlaid by Chakric diagrams, as if prematurely canonized as New Age Gods. Two Billboard sized works, one inside the gallery and one in the city itself, revisit the Saatchi Brothers' famous advertising campaign "Labour isn't working," adjusting it simply to "The world's not working." At the heart of the exhibition thus stands the declarative and the subtle undermining thereof: manifestoes composed from found texts (everything from political maxims to the lyrics of pop songs) announce the arrival of the "New Sincerity," a fictional system of radical expressionistic withdrawal that appears in times of chaos and doubt. Two gargantuan steel wind chimes at the center of the exhibition are a consequent play on scale; perhaps 100 times the size of normal wind-chimes, it would require a force of nature to sound them. And if they were sounded, they would ring out a major chord and its doleful, minor partner. A visual form to silence.
Mark Titchner was born in Luton in 1973. He has had solo shows at major institutions including Baltic, Gateshead (2008), Arnolfini, Bristol (2006), De Appel, Amsterdam (2004) and in 2006 was nominated for the Turner Prize. He has also participated in group shows at the Moscow Museum of Art, Petrovka (2007), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2007), Hayward Gallery, London (2006), South London Gallery, London (2005), Royal Academy, London (2004) and Tate Gallery, Liverpool (2004). In 2007 he participated in "A Poem about an Inland Sea" for the Ukraine Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Installation Shots
