An "unequal" pair from the ranks of philosophy and contemporary art were brought to the table for debate. The celebrated Russian philosopher Boris Groys, and the young international artist from Georgia Andro Wekua, discussed their shared experiences in the Soviet system, the conditions governing production in contemporary art today, and the sensitivities of a generation of artists born in the 1970s, taking Wekua's two large installations "Wait to Wait" and "Get Out of My Room" as examples.
Phenomena such as loneliness, doubles, repetitions, mirror images, and waiting are the central themes of this conversation, illustrated by pictures of the two installations and several collages by Wekua.
German philosopher, essayist, art critic and media theorist Boris Groys (born 1947 in East Berlin) teaches at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. His works oriented towards modern and contemporary art develop a reflection on modernity, postmodernity and the question of the subject.
Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua (born 1977 in Sukhumi, Georgia, lives and works in Switzerland) has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history. Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.
Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.
