Aleksander Komarov was born in 1971, Belarus, lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied at the Lyceum of Fine Arts, Minsk, (BY), Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan (PL) and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. His recent exhibitions include “Return of Memory”, KUMU (Tallinn, Estonia, 2007), “Progressive Nostalgia”, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, Italy, 2007), “How to do things? – In the Middle of (No)where)”, Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center (2006), “See you in Disneyland”, Fonds BKVB Project-studio (Berlin, 2006), “One Year After”, BA-CA Kunstforum (Vienna, 2006), “Project Rotterdam”, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2005), “The Architect”, Museum of Contemporary Arts (Minsk, BY, 2004), “Catching the Ghost”, HEDAH (Maastricht, NL, 2003), “Expect Relevance”, K3 (Zürich, CH, 2002), “Lot II”, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw, 2001). Komarov’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Art Magazine Moscow, Art Forum International, Umelez V (CZ), Metropolis M. (NL).
On Translation: Transparency/Architecture acoustique
Transparency is the prior issue in designing the environment of control politics. ‘Translating’ the information one gets from everyday urban surroundings is based on articulations of and experiences with the mass media.
Since 1999 we can watch the government working in the Reichstag in Berlin, as a tourist attraction, daily and live. It is a truly framed view, if anything is visible at all. The reflections of the spectacular architectural element are an obstacle to look through, but excite the visitors to take lots of pictures. The glass cupola of the Reichstag is designed in modernist fashion. It ‘seizes the light in its structure to modulate space and time visible in material existence.’ (‘Teaching at the Bauhaus’, R. K. Wick, p. 138) In the field of language “transparency” is a phrase, which is used in multiple, overlapping subjects . It describes, upon other meanings, the effort to suit one's rhetoric to the widest possible audience, without losing relevant information in the process. In another use of the word, transparency translates film material. Architecture acoustique emphasizes the articulated spectacle of transparency, a spectacle equally provoked by mass media and the recipients. When looking through a voluminous glass facade, it filters sound from both sides of the wall. In the film, translation is the interpretation of meaning of an image production into another visual language, of an equivalent message. The work employs images of the Bundestag in Berlin, the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam as a link between early modernist glass and steal architecture and its usage today and the Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) in Ýstanbul where the final work will be shown.
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