CELESTIAL CONTRAKT
Curated by
Christina Mitrentse and Jonas Ranson
Schwartz Gallery London
12 November - 6 December 2009

Dominic Allan . Nikos Alexiou . Alex Bunn Andrew Hladky . Bern Roche Farrelly . Stine Ljungdalh . Christina Mitrentse . Jonas Ranson . Lee Wagstaff . Marc Wayland

The exhibition Celestial Contrakt navigates through the terrain of the ‘celestial and ‘ethereal’ in an attempt to
offer different entry and exit points to the theme and suggests alternate possibilities within the experiential environments. Schwartz Gallery is formed as an uncharted territory which provisionally describes two conceptions of artworks as ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’. These create non-linear journeys that look beyond Materialist thought.

The project brings artist and viewer together to a conception in which the ‘terrestrial’ world does not yet exist and can only arise in the sphere of the imagination. A diverse group of international and London-based artists become wanderers inspace and time, drawing from a vast fluid field of collective ideas. The celestial as the nocturnal experience filters through from anthropological investigations, focusing on the ontological dimension; the impulse of irrationality in scientific and architectural artifacts and the surreal poetics of contemporary technology which appear to have cosmological associations.

Suggesting a state of irrational mystical delirium, the two-dimensional works, film, sculptural objects and performance, shed ‘light’ on the perception of quasiscientific phenomena. They can be characterized as positing the supremacy of hallucination, generating illusions from different time and space. The implication is one that places the artists in a position of pre-reflective mysticism.ng is characterized by surprise, expectation, and regeneration, darkness procures a different type of sentiment and consciousness.