Making contact, keeping contact, to contact. Contact as a connection with something that is unknown in the moment and unfamiliar in the system in use. Another area cannot adopt the opposition’s sign system and analyse it objectively. After the principle of the known or the unknown, contact always creates a unique interpretation, which is mutable in time. Contact is understood through a system familiar to the person.
The visual artist’s language and system is semiotic, and the artist interprets and analyses information through a sign system familiar to the art language. It isn’t always politically correct, but it looks at themes and tests borders where everything is not always black and white like some would want us to believe. Murka, who in her early works has reduced her sign system to black and white, makes contact with a theme that at first glance seems rigid and flat, but which holds innumerable controversies and emotions. In a battle contact means struggle with the enemy; for an artist the first contact is with the subject matter and the second with the audience. The exhibition interprets today’s political contacts, which have been executed through the format of war – “War is the continuation of politics by other means” (Carl von Clausewitz). Installations make up a whole in the rooms, referring to the black-and-white system that surrounds us. At the same time it is a pleasure to note that not all colour is lost in the world; art must be capable of bringing out the colours even at the most dull moments of history.
It is not a question of war and the point of war, it is a question of a meeting point and what it can teach us. If there is a contact, it is necessary for something and predetermined, the only important thing is to be present in the moment and come out of the contact with a new energy.
Maarit Murka