Gerasimos Floratos : Nodes

3 Dec 2020-16 Jan 2021

Overview

There is a scene in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1935 novel Invitation to a Beheading in which the soon-to-be-beheaded protagonist receives a prison visit from his estranged mother. At some point in their awkward conversation, she tells him about a kind of toy she played with as a child – strange, mottled, indecipherable objects that would resolve when placed in front of a particular kind of crooked mirror. In the mirrored surface, the rest of the world would appear totally distorted, but these ‘nonnons’ would become ‘wonderful, sensible’ images: ‘flowers, a ship, a person, a landscape’. She describes them as ‘marvellous gimmicks’. ‘Why do you tell me all this?’ the prisoner asks.