CHAOS-THEORY-METAHAVEN
Past exhibition

Metahaven: Chaos Theory

02.22.2024 - 06.09.2024

Founded by Dutch artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007, Metahaven is a renowned artist collective whose work blurs the boundaries of art, filmmaking and design. Encompassing a broad variety of mediums including moving images, exhibition design, graphics, digital interfaces, and theory, Metahaven is regarded today as a visionary agent in the advancement of post-digital, critical culture.

Metahaven's recent film piece, Chaos Theory (2021), is an enthralling audiovisual poem structured around the dialogues and wanderings of two characters: X (Valentina Di Mondo) and Y/Z (Georgina Dávid), as they reflectively confront the contemporary world and its puzzling flows of interconnected phenomena. Avoiding the use of conventional narrative language and the binaries of information technology, Chaos Theory operates as a non-linear tale challenging the divisions between fiction and fact, shared realities and dreams. Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the movie's landscape appears in contrast with its dreamlike scenes and the open-ended poetics of its dialogues. Likewise, the newly-conceived installation of this work spatially challenges the limits of the film screen by means of a large textile work that expands in the Museum's main gallery. This textile echoes some of the graphic patterns and objects that appear in the story, referencing data points and graphic vectors blended into a thick texture and color coding that is reminiscent of common upholstery motives in public transit.


Metahaven’s video installation is paired with a multiplicity of embroidered objects, understood as film stills and documents from the artists' expanded visual research and on view in the anteroom. Thus the presentation of Chaos Theory is accompanied by a display of selected pieces from Metahaven's Arrows (2020) and Blossoms (2021) series, featuring an array of complex digital embroideries on found jumpsuit jackets, commercial plastic bags, and small tapestries that remind of fabric samples or doormats, alongside the textile and video triptych Living Together in Stories (2022). Juxtaposing oneiric landscapes, abstract graphics, and symbols from the organic world, the artists invite us to challenge our certainties and envision a future defined by empathy, fluid identity, and interdependence.

Galleries: 103
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui


Metahaven
Chaos Theory
(2021)
Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)
Courtesy the artists

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