Rebus
In Rebus, Vári presents a dynamic visual and aural lexicon that explores the phenomenon of renaissance. Rebirth is an integral aspect of our cultural, scientific, spiritual and even political histories, and this work investigates how meaning is constructed through times of profound transition.
The work consists of two compositions, or intertwined narratives, interacting on two axes of projection. On one axis, the scene of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia, an engraving made in 1514, is re-enacted in various different ways, including a re-construction in x-ray images. On the other, sharing the same horizon, but in symbolic parallel, is an endless exodus. There is a constant procession, moving through the plane of the 1st axis, incorporating military processions, festivities, protests, refugee movements and religious pageants.
The reference to Dürer’s etching relates in different ways to the process of aesthetic creation. It refers not to the psychologised sense in which melancholia is understood today, but to an exploration of the impulse to excavate, to understand, the being-in-darkness only waiting for the arrival of the illumination of aesthetic inspiration, with the attendant visual references in the work to tools and equipment – evoking the Heideggerian sense of the work of art as a set of originatory practices, as both noun and verb.
Throughout the piece there is a tension between light and dark; between ’blindness’ and choosing to construct new ways of seeing, new systems of knowledge. Personages and objects appear and form fluid, evanescent relationships. Some magical communication is in progress, a seepage of meaning and of visual instances between the two axes, a rupture of time and space which allows the possibility of a third meaning. And that third meaning may be the creative process itself – a connection between the unconscious self and the realm of the chthonic and alchemical.
Rebus
2008
2-Channel Video Installation
Channel 1: 2′ 30″, Channel 2: 1′ 30″, Stereo audio 4′ 00″, looped