OFFoff + Kunsthal Gent present:
Suspension - Sebastian Diaz Morales
Opening & artist talk:
Friday 29 October 2021, 20.00, Old House
Suspension - Sebastian Diaz Morales
Video installation, 2K digital video, 14’30’’, 2014
Produced with the support of the Mondriaan Fonds
Presented by Art cinema OFFoff and Kunsthal Gent
The mind was dreaming.
The world was its dream.
Jorge Luis Borges
In Suspension a young man is hanging in the air, falling, or perhaps drifting through time and space. There is no particularor definite way to understand his situation. The enlarged image of the falling man gains a monumental quality in the exhibition space, where spectators are able to move up and down stairs and plateaus to engage with the image in a more intimate way. The installation takes its departing point from Moebius’s comic strip Absoluten Caufeltrail, where a man falls endlessly, crossing in his plunge several gates or dimensions of parallel universes. In his re-imagination of a man’s fall, Sebastián Díaz Morales envisions the world as an endless void, evoking a timeless gravity that makes us fall deeper and deeper into our own humanity.
Diaz Morales’s questioning of reality in film, whether concerning landscape, the urban, or even the sociopolitical, has been marked from the very outset by a fundamental distrust of the belief in a single, unified reality. With Diaz Morales, the camera does not function as a medium for faithfully depicting and recording what is observed, but is an essential, even epistemic means for questioning and appropriating reality.
Diaz Morales’s examination of perception and reality is based on the assumption that reality itself is by nature highly fictional. “I am very interested in the notion of reality and fiction. (...) My work explores the boundaries between reality and fiction,” says Diaz Morales. Thus, his films do not simply transport the viewer into another, surreal, or phantasmal realm, but they strip reality of its familiarity and distort it, making it seem like something else.
OFFoff + Kunsthal Gent present:
Suspension - Sebastian Diaz Morales
