Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Alienarium 5

14 Apr-4 Sep 2022

Detail of Metapanorama, 2022, Digital. Credit: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Overview

An immersive, supernatural and sensory environment by artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster imagines a Sensodrome for the Serpentine. Will it be speculative and visual fiction? What if an astrobleme became a Sensodrome in the middle of Hyde Park in 2022? Is a Sensodrome a place to stimulate our somatosensory system – a maison de rendez-vous? – a meeting point? Is it a mutant place contributing to the invention of new technologies of consciousness? What if aliens were in love with us? Would it change our relation to our planet and its lifeforms?

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, by Paul B. Preciado

An experimental artist based in Paris, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has, since 1990, been exploring the different modalities of sensory and cognitive relationships between bodies and spaces, real or fictitious, up to the point of questioning the distance between organic and inorganic life . Metabolising literary and cinematographic, architectural and musical, scientific and pop references, Gonzalez-Foerster creates ‘chambres’ and ‘interiors’, ‘gardens’, ‘attractions’ and ‘planets’, with respect to the multiple meanings that these terms take on in the works of Virginia Woolf or Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brontë sisters or Thomas Pynchon, Joanna Russ or Philip K. Dick. This investigation of spaces extends to a questioning of the implicit neutrality of practices and exhibition spaces. Her ‘mises en espace’, ‘anticipations’ and ‘apparitions’ seek to invade the sensory domain of the viewers in order to operate intentional changes in their memory and imagination. Haunted by history and future, Gonzalez-Foerster’s works become containers where the artist incubates a form of subjectivity that does not yet exist. Through multiple international exhibitions, short films, productions and concerts, Gonzalez-Foerster’s mutant work contributes to the invention of new technologies of consciousness.

Artists