Manuela Lalic

Rationaliser une fin de party
05.05–06.18.2005
Room 1

Manuela Lalic takes inspiration from materials found in her everyday environment to create structures evoking our system of social organization’s chaotic development, with its fixation on production and excessive consumption. Her sculptures and in situ installations attempt to describe transitory states of self-organization or of co-evolution with their environment. At once simple and complex, her apparatuses take form without any apparent overall plan. Nonetheless, each of them situates itself within its own particular organizational logic.

With Rationaliser une fin de party, Lalic deviates slightly from the dense and spatially compact empirical articulation with which she has familarized us in her previous work, in favour of more rational structures, where empty space creates volumes. A checkered plastic film circumscribes the space around an organization of metal grills in which inflated balloons and peacock feathers arrange themselves. Trays filled with things and dubious foodstuffs complete this installation that, as its title suggests, wants to organize the left-overs and empty space of the end of a party.

Manuela Lalic multiplies heterogenous references here. In fact, two contradictory imaginary worlds interact in Rationaliser une fin de party: that of life as organized, rational, compartmentalized and ordered and that of life as chaotic, unpredictable, capricious and unbounded. With a joyous casualness, this work underlines the paradoxical contrast between a rational society’s will to construct its future (while predicting it) and the generalized feeling of growing uncertainty. We find here the artist’s favourite themes, such as the coexistence of order and disorder, the abberations of the too full, marks of excess, degeneration and overadaption.

NdeB. translated by PduB.