Theory box

In the middle of a black box sits a model: an intensely-lit cluster of tiny mirrors that reflect a miniature wire-frame figure, next to a second figure on another plinth. The visual trickery of the installation multiplies the figures and confuses image and reality. Yet its components are simple: light, darkness, mirrors, and wire figures. Its setup is based on the dancer Loïe Fuller’s Mirror Dance first performed in 1895, and other nineteenth-century optical tricks. More theory box than art installation, this collaboration between a lighting designer and an academic fashion historian poses a series of questions about the relationship between the original and its reflection. Doubling as a box of tricks that is both intellectual and visual, it conceives theory as spectacular, from the Greek theoria, contemplation or speculation, and theorein, to speculate or look at; hence theoros, spectator. It triangulates three terms: theory –speculation – model. The box is a speculation on the nature of the model, based on the rich etymology of the word as a measure, a scaled representation, a pattern for artists, an architectural model and, in the early 20th century, both a fashion and a mathematical model. Its little wire-frame figures create a model of a model, the Théâtre de la Mode that toured Europe in 1945-6. Does it theorize the model, or model theory? Like the miniature hall of mirrors in the installation, the answers endlessly replicate the questions from new points of view.

Other exhibitors are : 29 scenographers, performers, choreographers, visual artists, film directors, drama theatres, installation artists, fashion designers, writers, and painters. They include: Romeo Castellucci (theatre director, Avignon festival), Markus Schinwald ( Austria, and at next Venice Biennale), Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (artists), Anna Viebrock (scenographer), Josef Nadj (choreographer, director of the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléan).

Following the Prague Quadrennial, during 2011 parts of the Intersection project will travel to Santacangelo (IT), Munich (DE), Évora (PT), Bergen (NO), Riga (LAT), Nitra (SK), Terni (IT), Belgrade (RS), Helsinki (FI), and Budapest (HU).