Besides being the forerunner of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp was also a great chess player. In the solo show “Espera”, Gisela Motta (1976) and Leandro Lima (1976) present the 2013 work “Contra Duchamp” [Against Duchamp], a series that reenacts 21 chess games played by Duchamp in the beginning of the 20th century. The games are reproduced in animations made with LEDs, based on the game notation codes. Motta and Lima’s aim here is not to so much to make an exact representation of the games, but rather to reveal the player behind the great artist.
On benches displayed on the exhibition space an image of a seated person – revealed only by the projection of that person’s shadow on the floor – suggests tiredness and impatience. The installation “Espera” (2013), from which the exhibition gets its name, creates an interplay of shadows of two people, suggesting that it is impossible for them ever to meet.
In “Captcha” [2012] phrases taken from a dialogue of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, by Stanley Kubrick, were digitally distorted into the patterns of CAPTCHA: an acronym for the expression “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” The texts were produced by industrial embroidery machines programmed by a computer. In the film, the astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole find themselves at the mercy of their shipboard computer, which becomes increasingly human and begins to control their spacecraft.
In each video of the installation “PLAN Y” [2008-2010], a battle tank searchs for its opponent moving on two distinct landscapes. They perform a constant search for its opponent but once they never meet the war seems to be meaningless.
Time sets the tone for the exhibition “Espera”. It appears in “Contra Duchamp”, represented in the chess games played by Duchamp, in the idea of repetition in “Wait”, and finally in the constant search represented in “PLAN Y”.
Besides being the forerunner of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp was also a great chess player. In the solo show “Espera”, Gisela Motta (1976) and Leandro Lima (1976) present the 2013 work “Contra Duchamp” [Against Duchamp], a series that reenacts 21 chess games played by Duchamp in the beginning of the 20th century. The games are reproduced in animations made with LEDs, based on the game notation codes. Motta and Lima’s aim here is not to so much to make an exact representation of the games, but rather to reveal the player behind the great artist.
On benches displayed on the exhibition space an image of a seated person – revealed only by the projection of that person’s shadow on the floor – suggests tiredness and impatience. The installation “Espera” (2013), from which the exhibition gets its name, creates an interplay of shadows of two people, suggesting that it is impossible for them ever to meet.
In “Captcha” [2012] phrases taken from a dialogue of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, by Stanley Kubrick, were digitally distorted into the patterns of CAPTCHA: an acronym for the expression “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” The texts were produced by industrial embroidery machines programmed by a computer. In the film, the astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole find themselves at the mercy of their shipboard computer, which becomes increasingly human and begins to control their spacecraft.
In each video of the installation “PLAN Y” [2008-2010], a battle tank searchs for its opponent moving on two distinct landscapes. They perform a constant search for its opponent but once they never meet the war seems to be meaningless.
Time sets the tone for the exhibition “Espera”. It appears in “Contra Duchamp”, represented in the chess games played by Duchamp, in the idea of repetition in “Wait”, and finally in the constant search represented in “PLAN Y”.
