FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alexander Viscio Inside Islam
A Live-Site Installation from Vienna, Austria video-streamed to:
The Outpost, NYC., Artspace, New Haven, Ct., Wm Turner Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, Paris, and Oslo.
Curator: Caterina Verde
Wien
NYC, New Haven, Atlanta, Paris, Oslo and more..
What should have been road-kill was a joke for a “Late Night Talk Show” host when Viscio strapped on a car size tumble weed on his shoulders and headed north (in the center lane) on the south bound 101 Hollywood Free-way during the morning rush hour. That was the launching of what would later come to pass as “Vehicles for Another Landscape”
Since then Alexander Viscio has produced numerous apparatus containing his body in order to navigate in what otherwise can be defined as heretical environments and situations that don’t always endorse such activity. These “Vehicles” with their tongue twisted verbal puns from literary conventions draw attention to the objectification of language and exploits its abstract qualities. Language is a vehicle for diplomacy and in worst case scenario of misinterpretation, can serve as an incendiary device to validate destruction. The potential for re-interpretation can provide a basis to reconstruct the “word” literally so that it can exist as an object with a more transient embodiment to signify meaning and content by becoming the experience itself.
The live video stream event of the Live-Site Installation “Inside Islam”. Viscio extends the notion of a single word as a domain, to occupy physically, transforming a word into an Outpost. In this case, Viscio will be covered with coal, (as fuel or energy) inside a word from an Arabic newspaper on an article about “Islam in Europe”. The word was chosen for its abstract and minimalist character compared to calligraphy of Western languages and was built using centuries old wood bending techniques, (to induce elasticity when approaching diversity). Viscio will communicate through a head set that will allow him to hear and answer questions via a live video stream/internet connection while conducting experiments that investigate the capacity of language to contain and sustain a human presence. www.strangepositioningsystems.org will carry the event live and offer images of both the action in Europe and the activities in the USA simultaneously.
It is apparent that the “West” is entrenched in a pinnacle of reckoning itself with the rest of the world and must attempt to embrace alternate systems of faith, languages and religion in order to engage in a more global community of exchange.
This work is a multi media event that illustrates a visual artists’ approach to exploring not only the architecture of Arabic calligraphy but to share what it’s like to actually be inside a language that for so many remains mysterious and obscure if only through a lack of exposure and examination.
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