THE MIRROR, THE CORRIDOR
Rafał Morusewicz Guilherme Maggessi
Two women walk along a corridor. One has dark-brown hair and wears a dark winter coat. She holds a flower bouquet wrapped in white paper with one of her hands. She pushes the half-open window frame along the way. She looks hopeful, her mouth forming a soft grin. The other woman is blond and wears a heavy beige-coloured coat. Despite her efforts of looking straight ahead, her eyes keep falling to the floor – it is unclear if out of tiredness or fear. The women part their ways midway through the corridor and go toward different doors. Apart from their coincidental companionship until that moment, the only one feeling they share is loss over a sense of a future.
A “wormhole” can be(come) many things, and many things can be wormholes(-in-becoming). In a straightforward sense, a wormhole is a hole in wood or fruit, burrowed by a worm. It is also a scientific term that describes a hypothetical tunnel-like structure between two separate points in spacetime; its popularized version frequently occurs in sci-fi films and novels, where it becomes a useful narrative shortcut that the characters traverse at the speed of light. Figuratively, the word may describe a research process of immersing oneself into a deep tunnel of digressions that turn out to be productive detours or frustrating culs-de-sac. Internet spaces teeming with hyperlinks, like Wikipedia, are engineered in a way that invites its users to travel from one page to the next, as if jumping into another wormhole with each click.
Maggessi/Morusiewicz’s “The Mirror, the Corridor” at PIANA Gallery is an exhibition in the duo’s ongoing “Wormholes” project series. Having started with a prompt to engage with the concept of “the portal” for the 2022 exhibition at Vienna’s VBKÖ, the project soon expanded into an increasingly self-referential collection of filmwork, sculptural installations, sound pieces, peri-academic writing, and a stage performance that explored relational forms of listening, watching, and telling stories. The duo’s interest lies heavily in their engagement with strategies of contamination and (de)contextualisation such as collage and montage; what seeps through their ongoing practice is an ever-growing dialogue into the role of affect and relationality in the engagement with moving image.
With the project’s each presentation ever-slightly shifting focus, “The Mirror, the Corridor” is both a zoom in and a zoom out, a rewind and a fast-forward. The exhibition, conceptualized specifically for PIANA gallery, presents the ongoing series of works by Maggessi/Morusiewicz as a distorted reflection and invites its visitors to look into the duo’s work from a process-oriented standpoint.