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The Inquisitors
An installation by Mark Hipper Filaments, tendrils curling out of the brick wall. A growth gleams with the dull metallic sheen of graphite that renders these protuberances - they are less objects than an action or a condition - alien. They do not represent anything, instead they embody an action, a motion, extending into/intruding upon the confined interior space, encroaching on the physical/psychical space the viewer occupies. This potentially invasive action is here not an act of overt brutal violence, but instead a surreptitious, hesitant, unnoticeably slow growth. An inquiry, a motion directed towards the viewer, it is not this artwork that is under investigation so much as perhaps the person inhabiting this space upon which they encroach. The Inquisitors name an action and not the agent. Our experience of the 'real' is conditional to, subject to, our will. To name something is to objectify it, and make it subject. The unnamable, the alien, is so because it intrudes from outside our frame of control, will and domain of subjugation. And yet these hair-like filaments suggest the familiar, our own bodies and hair (dead tissue growing out of living tissue: the abject). They hover; seem suspended in time, in that state of the liminal, of becoming. The action is never carried out, never completed, but arrested in its unfolding, forever unfolding.
Mark Hipper's Inquisitors, Sue Williamson, ArtThrob Issue No. 65, January 2003
Donga
Joáo Ferreira Gallery, 9 January - 2 February 2020
The Inquisitors, 2002, Painted jacaranda, Installation view, Joáo Ferreira Gallery
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