Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk

Introduction

Reading Complex is a curatorial research project initiated by curators Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Catherine Y. Serrano, supported by the MA Course Curating the Contemporary, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, delivered in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery. The project and its coinciding programmes investigate the notion of reading through the introduction of a variety of conditions and configurations where its alternating manifestations within the ‘present moment’ diverge. In that, Reading Complex forms both the overarching title and leitmotiv for a research platform and a programme of exhibition projects as a temporary accumulative function and installment considering, showing and engaging with the ever-changing, but palpable nexus between viewer-reader and image-text.

Leitmotiv

With Reading Complex we intend to create a hub, a temporal complex, inviting thinkers and practitioners from the field of contemporary art to discuss their ideas, thoughts and practices, and generate a mode of engagement considering the idea of ‘reading images’. Both areas of enquiry – ‘reading’ and ‘the image’ – are subject to a continuous flux and transformation and thus require our constant evaluation and involvement in a complex mode of dialogue and exchange with each other, one in which experience and reflection can come together. 

We, as viewers, are increasingly tempted to assume that both reality (the world of facts) and fiction (the imaginary, the unreal) occupy the same realm within the imagery of today. In that, we as viewers become paranoid readers of images: alert to fakery, montage, editing, scenario and staging. As Salman Rushdie remarks: “The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.” On the other end, images appear to be the only evidence required to render an event credible and immediate: herein the viewer is allocated as the figure who authenticates the narrative (a sequence of images) by presenting him or herself as both narrator and eyewitness. In realizing that images are not merely the objects of a non-media reality but instead create their own realities, has become an integral part of the ability to read contemporary images within the present. 

Through a shared and collective practice, we hope that Reading Complex enables us to constitute a ‘container of knowledge’, a ground of accumulation, as being something we actively produce through our various practices. As the boundaries between reality and fiction continue to erode, we all feel the need to explore how these might come together beyond context or illustration. 

Seemingly simple, but disturbingly difficult to grasp, ‘reading images’ forms the leitmotiv for a project that seeks to explore critical points of fragmentation in everyday life. Rather than presenting single statements, Reading Complex will create a space for showing a range of attitudes that confronts a total conception of this polemic, focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes.

Reading Complex Act I - Coordinates

“We haven’t located us yet” - The Darjeeling Limited, 2008

Understood generally as absolute and fixed, Reading Complex - Act II emphasises coordinates as a constructed and arbitrary system. Implemented as a tool for understanding and processing our location – geographic or metaphoric – they are a means of communicating one’s current place to someone elsewhere. A series of points plotted like crumbs, coordinates lay down the bait of orientation while we draw, shift and re-place the lines of destination or departure.

Coordinates will investigate how we utilise documents, image and other visual elements to communicate and process degrees of the unknown, how we locate or place ourselves within varying degrees of context and how to come to terms with our own mobility. Reading Complex - Act II aims to circumscribe ideas deemed as absolute – that the coordinate here might be there depending on which way the compass is facing.

Reading Complex Act II - Relocations

“Probably we don’t know how to see or listen. Or the sound is too loud and drowns reality. To learn to see in order to hear elsewhere. To learn to hear oneself speaking in order to see what the others are doing. The others, the elsewhere of our here.” - Quote from Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), 1976

The second act Relocations is essentially concerned with the question: How to construct and inhabit one’s own image? How can we as viewers dissect alternative information and knowledge from seemingly fixed images and image sequences? To what extent and by what means can we be critical about a statement or an account that is presented to us?

With Relocations we would like to raise and further interrogate a problematic that is concerned with the ambiguity of meaning underlying an image or a document. For this we invited a number of artists, writers and curators that actively engage with positions in which the image is in limbo, displaced and misplaced from their original context, lifted out of the flow of events, to be investigated and analysed. This could be further considered as a conflict with and a movement from the loss of the documentary image to its recovery in the element of the fictional. It is these amorphous areas, these gray zones, that this act seeks to address, particularly in how they form a difficult aspect of our reality today.

In other words, Relocations intends to proffer a sort of “poetics of transportation”: prompting the viewer to think about the (underlying) construction and the hinterland of a document and the maker’s role in that, and the responsibility of viewers themselves.