Steve Hollingsworth and Jim Colquhoun perform regularly as Two Ruins, a collaborative practice wherein they inhabit a space between sculpture, sound art and performance, investigating the relationships between film, installation, language and sound. A Voyage to Arcturus (Redux) is a new installation exploring a shared obsession with early speculative fiction through the prism of 'Voyage to Arcturus', an inter-dimensional travelogue which speaks of the development of bizarre new senses attendant on journeys to extramundane landscapes produced in 1920 by writer David Lindsay.
"Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful [and] jale [to be] dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous."
In 1781 in the 'Critique of Pure Reason', the German philosopher Immanuel Kant warned that the human brain, in squeezing the extant world through its feeble sensuous apparatus gives it a verisimilitude that it does not actually possess, in a doomed attempt to forge order from chaos. Otherwise, «all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves, would disappear».
Fast forward then to the early 21st century and those objects have come decisively adrift from the death grip of the human psyche, staring back at us from their newly-forged otherness they correspond to a truth that is contingent in our moving towards them as they fly before us, always inexhaustibly themselves, always more than we can imagine.
For Lydgalleriet and Ekko Festival, Two Ruins peer through the lens of early science fiction in an attempt to move beyond the ontological irredenta of our present spatio-temporal locale and towards somewhen else. As in previous works, the artists use their own bodies as a locus with which to explore the outer reaches of innerness, in this instance, as body becomes landscape becomes planet we escape the confines of our tiny cosmological dust mote and venture out, where no carbon-based lifeform has gone before.
Curated by Julie Lillelien Porter and supported by Bergen City Council.