Talk with Dust

About

carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce the exhibition of a recent video installation by the Argentinian artist Sebastian Diaz Morales. Talk with Dust will be his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. Diaz Morales’ work draws upon the traditions of South American avant-garde cinema, narrative film, and documentary practice to create films and video installations. Through fragmented, abstract scenarios, the artist articulates elastic conceptions of time and space that mine the borderline between reality and fiction.

The philosopher Michael Marder describes dust as an element that transgresses the boundaries between temporal modalities, residing in a non-linear, non-sequential time that collapses the “babel” of past, present, and future. “Eternity is time configured as space, or space indis- tinguishable from time,” he writes, “and dust is its swirling, rolling, disintegrating, and conglomerating image.” In Talk with Dust, Diaz Morales once again returns to the harsh, arid Patagonian landscape that has significantly shaped his artistic language. Spreading across six-channels displayed in two rooms of the gallery, Talk with Dust opens with a vertical projection of road shot from a moving vehicle. With the camera focused entirely on the asphalt, we don’t see any of the surrounding landscape, and with its whirring yellow lines and patchy zig-zags of tar, this view of Patagonia’s route 26 dissolves into something that resembles a Structuralist film more than a scenic drive— thereby setting the tone for a jour- ney without a clear destination. Over the video’s six channels, which unfold over screens of different sizes and orientation, we encounter a slow-burning candle, a drummer improvising, an explosion, and a car cycling endlessly in the desert. Through the viewers’ own movement through space, these isolated occurrences form their own asynchronic narrative and

generate a fragmented world—rich mental and material territories on “the other side of the real” where the fantastic resides.