Mimesis in Turbulence

Dr. Renzo Filinich Orozco

8 to 10 May

In his work Mimesis in Turbulence, Dr Renzo Filinich Orozco weaves together science, art and philosophy to explore va number of interrelated questions: the subversion of the colonial gaze; the entanglement of subjects and objects within laboratory practices; and the nature of simulation and reproduction of images in the post-representational era. The installation takes the deceptively simple form of a generative light display, but behind the patterned light a sense of the cosmological cycles through which life is continually reproduced is elicited, in turn prompting reflections on and experimentation with the possibilities life as lived - in its material contexts, and in the specificities of these material instantiations, whether it be neoliberal global capitalism or the post-Apartheid, postcolonial moment. Look more closely and the light illuminates colonial-era photography; in turn, these patterns of light are modulated by the voice of Steve Biko. Operating at the juncture of cosmotechnics and diffraction – the former a world in which many worlds are possible and the latter, gleaned from theoretical physics, denoting the ways in which we are already bound up in the methods and results of the forms of inquiry we use to think about ourselves and the world – Mimesis in Turbulence invites us to consider our position again: not as subjects contemplating separate objects or a world beyond us, but instead as active, complicit participants in an ongoing, technologically enmeshed and relational aesthetic project of collective sensing, worlding and becoming.

Text by Dr. Chantelle Gray

Photography by Reshma Chhiba