JAN FABRE DO WE FEEL WITH OUR BRAIN AND THINK WITH OUR HEART? December 12th, 2014 – February 28th, 2015 GALERIE KLÜSER Jan Fabres artistic work is characterised by a striving for the sublime and the search for beauty and perfection. In all this, his focus is on the human body. Consequently, he pays particular attention to the brain as the central organ dealing with sensual impressions and directing our movements and actions. For more than 10 years now, Fabre has devoted himself to a thorough investigation into the human cerebrum, which – in the artists view – is the most mysterious part of our bodies. The basis to the exhibition “Do we feel with our brain and think with our heart?” is a long, intense dialogue with the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, the discoverer of mirror neurons, which provide the foundation to our sense of empathy. However, even to the present day there is a lack of research on some of the brains processes, ways of functioning and connections. It still represents a partial terra incognita for science. Since time immemorial, western culture has defined our personalities through two organs understood as dichotomous: the brain and the heart. Emotion, spiritual senses, intuition and the creative process have always been supposed by our culture to lodge in the heart, forming the linchpin of much artistic debate on the significance of an integral perception of intellect and emotion. Now Fabre, using an artistic approach and the resources of a scientist, devotes himself to the question whether we think with our hearts and feel with our brains or vice versa, personally taking on the task of exploring this new territory. The works shown in the exhibition are the outcome of this intense working method. The exhibitions centrepiece is a fourteen-minute film, in which Fabre and Rizzolatti fathom, via self-experiment among other things, the neurons mode of functioning and their limitations. With sculptures made from silicon, paired with various other objects, Fabre transforms the object into a symbol. The drawings, which seem almost surreal on occasion, probe chiefly the links between the brain, the heart and the body. “Where there is an understanding of perception – as Joseph Beuys once said – we find reality.”
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 18:27:43 +0000