João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr
Sep 10th – Oct 9th, 2011
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf
Press release
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva (born 1979 and 1977) describe their work as a poetical philosophical fiction. A central source of inspiration for the Portuguese artist duo are the writings of the
little-known French author René Daumal (1908-1944) who bemoaned the loss of myths in modern society and devoted himself to the limits of conventional perception and the magic of things.
As Daumal described in his 1943 short story “The Determining Memory,” Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr was a sound himself made during one of his visions of the hereafter. Like
Daumal, who negated the boundaries between the mysterious and the rational in his writings, knowledge overlaps with surreal, unexplainable apparitions in Gusmão’s and Paiva’s films, photographs and sculptures in which they artistically visualise the incomprehensible and unimaginable.
In a kind of dreamscape setting developed especially for the exhibition, the artists show a series of works that challenge reason in particular with filmic means, optical illusions and obscure experiments and deal with the problem of reliably illustrating reality.
The exhibition is accompanied by a German/English publication with numerous colour illustrations and texts by Elodie Evers, René Daumal and João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva