Barbara Seiler

« What we are concerned with now are the implications – in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ »
J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

The objects that surround us in our everyday life rarely attract our attention. They usually disappear behind their function. And even those that require our interaction on a daily basis, for us, they exist only in a far distant. What lays behind the lack of our attention is yet an impressive network of ideological, conceptual and technological implications. In a constant process of optimizing our life we have, often violently and at the cost of our natural environment, fueled a general process of consolidation. If we look at the objects that define our personal environment we identify a set of technological objects, but more fundamentally, a subservience of the real to the implications of pure functionality and industrial production. In a way, the biggest civilization revolution of the last decades is at hand.
What do we see? We see hands, fingers, in fact, body parts lacking their vibrant joint flexibility. We see supporting structures that substitute the former bone structure. Vertebral limbs, trans-humanist inversion, which has already preceded us and pretends to look after us. The reality of a patient is the reality of a hospital where the condition of the body is already saturated with technology. But despite all that, it is still the body that suffers and the body that sets the tone.
The works of Vanessa Safavi in her first solo exhibition at the Barbara Seiler did not fail to remind me of this little, squeaky white sign. The materials that inhabit the medical environment, intended as means to providing care, are the ones that are of the most synthetic nature. Here, where we silently hope to find a certain level of comfort, we actually find the only thing that the post-modern human being is still capable of producing: „Here, we are not alone. There are others, those nearby. And yet, there is no place where we are also alone.“ An absolute neutrality, from which no compassionate look nor fraternal embracement emerges, perfectly nice, perfectly mastered, but in which just nothing happens anymore. We need to get out, even at the risk of loosing care, looking for an unexpected encounter, an accident, get involved into a major political event or simply run out of the most essential to rescue us, and if it is only for a brief moment, to escape this thick fog of relativism and comfort.
What Vanessa Safavi evokes is a simple joy. But it unfolds around a historical and personal context, which imposes upon us in its full existential and ontological commotion. French: