3 February–19 March 2006
Opening Friday 3 February 7-9pm
For our first exhibition of the year Signal is pleased to present the Malmö based artist Martin Jacobson and Hito Steyerl, artist and film-maker based in Berlin. The exhibition deals with how gestures and symbols are used for interpreting and producing facts and fiction.
In the body of work entitled Compositions (2006), Martin Jacobson has worked with an investigative account of attributes and symbols which have been consistently used in the portrayal of women through the ages. The moon has figured as the ultimate symbol in connection with woman while the sun has been linked with man. The clearest example of this notion is to be found in Greek mythology in the figures of the sun-god Apollo and the moon-goddess Artemis who were twins. The sun is an active, energy-creating heavenly body while the moon is a fossil planet which reflects the radiance of the sun like a mirror. In Europe, at about the turn of the previous century, the moon turned up everywhere in art and literature as a symbol for woman. Women were portrayed in front of round mirrors, in and above water, in the moonlight, veiled, sleeping, sick or dead. How are these attributes and symbols used today and how close to the original idea are contemporary media and advertising images of women?
Hito Steyerl’s film November (2004, 25 min) takes its point of departure in the feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock she made with her best friend Andrea Wolf when they were seventeen. By tracing Andrea Wolf’s life from a fictitious martial-arts heroine to a “real” heroine in the PKK, the Kurdistan resistance movement, Hito Steyerl poses questions about the mutual influence of fiction and facts. Using poses and attributes borrowed both from the cinema and from real life we learn how the image of a hero is constructed and, at the same time, depersonalized, finally being used symbolically in other contexts. In November Hito Steyerl questions the militant gesture and the way in which traditional mythology of revolution works today at a time when it seems to have ended up in a cul-de-sac. The film mirrors the era of November, when revolution seems to have passed and only its gestures remain.
