The immersive spatial installation NOASIS is a site-specific and walk-in work consisting of six windows, as they are known from historicist buildings in Vienna. Their window panes are covered with a special film - a so-called spy mirror film - which, thanks to its reflective properties, allows hardly any insight into the interior of the installation and instead confronts the viewer with their own reflection. The film is permeable from the inside, so you can observe without - depending on the lighting situation - being seen directly yourself. Only one person at a time can remain inside NOASIS and thus temporarily escape the social situation of the exhibition or the exhibition opening.
In NOASIS, Jari Genser takes up Michel Foucault's principle of panoptism, which he identified as constitutive of the disciplinary society: “The person who is subject to visibility and knows this takes on the coercive means of power and plays them out against himself; he internalizes the power relationship in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjugation.”
Jari Genser plays with the tension between transparency and opacity in both a literal and figurative sense, allowing viewers to look behind the mirrors or take a seat behind them, as it were. In his artistic analyses of spaces and spaces within spaces, mirrors and their reflective surfaces play an important role; a mirror is able to expand a space and thus open up insights that would otherwise have been denied to the viewer.
Text: Veronika Rudorfer
The immersive spatial installation NOASIS is a site-specific and walk-in work consisting of six windows, as they are known from historicist buildings in Vienna. Their window panes are covered with a special film - a so-called spy mirror film - which, thanks to its reflective properties, allows hardly any insight into the interior of the installation and instead confronts the viewer with their own reflection. The film is permeable from the inside, so you can observe without - depending on the lighting situation - being seen directly yourself. Only one person at a time can remain inside NOASIS and thus temporarily escape the social situation of the exhibition or the exhibition opening.
In NOASIS, Jari Genser takes up Michel Foucault's principle of panoptism, which he identified as constitutive of the disciplinary society: “The person who is subject to visibility and knows this takes on the coercive means of power and plays them out against himself; he internalizes the power relationship in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjugation.”
Jari Genser plays with the tension between transparency and opacity in both a literal and figurative sense, allowing viewers to look behind the mirrors or take a seat behind them, as it were. In his artistic analyses of spaces and spaces within spaces, mirrors and their reflective surfaces play an important role; a mirror is able to expand a space and thus open up insights that would otherwise have been denied to the viewer.
Text: Veronika Rudorfer
© Jari Genser 2024
© Jari Genser 2024