Teresa Solar: RIDE RIDE RIDE

Teresa Solar works with objects and the space in between them, with narratives and broken information. Solar experiments with textures and physicality understanding art as a situation to discover, feel and think. Her exhibited objects can be sculpture and also set material, can be produced or found but is in the conjunction that the whole group becomes a para-linguistic structure with internal dialogues in several timelines.

In her exhibition, Teresa Solar is mixing classic Egyptian mythology, details of contemporary history and linguistic theory: A sculpture of Nut – the goddess of the night in pharaonic Egypt – becomes the axis of the space at Index Foundation and a partner in a dialogue with plenty of references. Curro, the mascot of the universal exhibition in Sevilla 1992, with its bright colors and cartoonish design, is divided in fragments of memory and disappearance. A killer whale becoming a children’s game and a stretched tiger show the porosity and elasticity of objects, nodding the capacity of art to define other ways of relating to them and modifying its signification. A canoe with a new layer of paint is now an eye, a body, an openness. And still a canoe. Gestures become objects and games, objects become unwritten words and sensual connections, lapses of time offering the next experience to be discovered.

André Malraux had with his imaginary museum a collection of images to construct meaning: many possible museum narratives where waiting to be built from the selected photographs collected at Malraux’s archive. What happens when instead of possible images what we have is real objects? Can objects become the museum and not just the idea of the museum? Is the museum a physical experience? Can objects disappear while becoming a museum experience? Can objects become a trigger for memory? To visit an exhibition is a confrontation with hidden languages and bits of information and, still, a visual and performative contact with colors and surfaces.

And what happens with the relation object and art? The Anatomy Museum – to take an example – shows non-artistic objects related to the body and can create displays around them and with them. But is the display an artistic construction? Is the exhibition an idea of display? Are we presenting objects that are more important than others? Teresa Solar takes all these questions and offers practical and poetical results: everything is here in present time, everything is happening with us, it is in the social and linguistic construction of the moment that the meaning is valued and shared.

The experience of the visit, the idea of the game and the construction of the cultural experience are related to the exhibitional but also to other formats of interaction. The planning of emotions at the amusement park – with the common acceptance of the fictionalization of a fragment of reality – offers us another type of contact with objects: objects at the amusement park are there to be part of the hallucinatory construction and controlled fear as a mechanism for feelings. And as a mechanism with a transparent goal, the machinery doesn’t need to be hidden.

Let’s stop one second before the decision and keep all the options open for a myriad of approaches. It’s happening here in between everything.

Teresa Solar has presented her work in contexts such as Sculpture Park (Koln), Kunstverein Munich, La Panera (Lleida), Het Wilde Weten (Rotterdam), Kunst Institute (Basel). She has had a residency at Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart) and has been a visiting teacher at the Stuttgart Kunst Akademie.

This exhibition is produced in collaboration with Matadero Madrid Centro de Creación Contemporánea and with the generous support of Acción Cultural Española AC/E, the Spanish Embassy in Stockholm and NKF (Nordiska Konstförbundet).