Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.

René Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1952

Paul Hance

super-actant transcendence, 2020

irridecent glass, pink mouth blown glass,

opal glass, chicken wire, silver gilded

35 x 34 x 10 cm

We were installing Paul’s wall piece in the morning and in the evening he would send me this article by Caroline Humphrey:

Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’ Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism

Shamans’ mirrors, and mirrors in general, have two quite different sides, one reflecting images and the other a dull blank or imagined as a teeming other world. It is argued that, for shamanists, the far side of the mirror is conceived as the world of the dead, which is populated by spirits. Living people can, in certain circumstances such as divination, see ‘through’ the mirror into that world, and shamans when interacting with spirits in trance place themselves inside it. Two different perspectives, of the living and of the souls/spirits, are thus produced. The article ends with some speculations about the non-symmetrical character of these perspectives and concludes that the Mongols upholding these traditions are not post-moderns.

Key words: mirror, vision, death, fear, truth

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

patterns of an unstable frame, 2019

Archival pigment print

Print 50 x 40 cm

Frame 54,7 x 44,8 cm

Edition 2 of 2 + 2 AP

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Heinrich-Heine Strasse (Aldi), 2019

Archival pigment print

Print 62,5 x 50 cm

Frame 69,6 x 56,8 cm

Edition 2 of 2 + 2 AP

Paloma Varga Weisz

Foreign Body, 2020

basswood

37x 19 x 33 cm

Paloma Varga Weisz

Earface, 2008/2016

water color on paper

31 x 23 cm

Paloma Varga Weisz

Fur Coat, 2007

water color, pencil on paper

31 x 41 cm

Paloma Varga Weisz

Grumbler, 2007

water color, pencil on paper

46 x 61 cm

Paloma Varga Weisz

Hängender, 2008

water color, pencil on paper

45 x 61 cm

Paul Hance

dérèglement des sens, 2020

sand stone, mouth blown glass,

bamboo, silver mirroring, jeans

H. 118 cm ø 60 cm

LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR
Mongolian riddles are a good place to start when investigating the cultural meaning given to objects, as they work by providing clues to the knowledge a member of society is supposed to have. Halha riddles make clear that mirrors problematise looking and touching, image and substance – and in particular the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’:

It makes one into two
Nameless and white

If you look, it is like a person
If you think, it is like a corpse

PERSPECTIVES FROM ‘INSIDE’ THE MIRROR
The shamans sing:
All of us from the sunny splendid land
Each of us from the leafy beautiful world
Your red worm animals of the nine-jewelled universe
Beg your grace of future happiness

Text fragments of Caroline Humphrey’s article
Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’
Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism, University of Cambridge

Angela Mewes

Mount Kaplan, 2020

Fine Art print on Hahnemühle paper

Photo by Richard E. Byrd, 1929

24 x 30 cm

Edition 1 of 2 + 2 AP

Angela Mewes

Habit Custom, 2020

Tumeric, acrylic on linen

65 x 51 cm

 

Laida Lertxundi

Autoficción, 2020

USA/Spain/New Zealand

14 min, 35 mm, color, sound

Edition of 3 plus 1 artists proof

Digital Master file

DCP and 35 mm reference print

Borrowing its title from a literary genre, the film acknowledges the indeterminacy of both fiction and the self. Noir elements are reduced to deadpan gestures under bright California sunlight. Field recordings made in New Zealand are heard as women speak with each other about motherhood, abortion, breakups and anxiety. A civil rights parade moves slowly down a street. Bodies appear in states of weariness, injured or at rest, while songs by Irma Thomas and Goldberg evoke the passing of time and an uncertain future.