X ERGO Y
Stedelijk | Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, 1071 DJ | The Netherlands
Nov. 27 - Jan. 19, 2015
American artist Tony Oursler created X ERGO Y especially for the Stedelijk. Oursler works in a range of mediums, including video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting and is widely considered one of America's leading contemporary artists. X ERGO Y is the first art projection to be screened on the facade of the new wing.
The video combines rotating 3D scans and computer models of artefacts (including a voodoo doll, a classical sculpture, and a Tibetan skull) with statements and questions that relate to the beliefs and ideas with which we give meaning to the world around us.
Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf says: "Tony Oursler takes us through the history of human civilizations, and reveals that our world view is perpetually re-shaped by new technologies and scientific research. After all, we live in an era in which our ways of seeing the world are constantly shifting."
Reliability and the mass media are central themes in Oursler's oeuvre. With this journey through the history of civilizations and human belief systems, the artist both illustrates their diversity while simultaneously warning us of the apparent ease with which this complex material can be compactly presented through digital media. Will the individual objects and phenomena retain their uniqueness, or be reduced to interchangeable elements of this rhetorical slide show?