Missika returns to the gallery for his second solo show with an exhibition titled Aquí Allá Ahí (here, there, yonder). It is typical of the Berlin-based artist’s intangible documentation of time and its passing, as he creates ideas around how movement shifts the perception of space, relative to the observer.
Through the use of linguistics, a subjective interpretation is left to the audience. ‘Más o Menos’ is an installation of 12 modified hygrometers, each inscribed with an emotion: hope, confusion, anxiety, confidence… Swapping the measurement of humidity with the categorization of mental capacities and processes can be interpreted as a mood-swing of sorts, linking fluctuations of personality to the changing weather.
The exhibition’s main sculpture, ‘El Espesor del Tiempo’, is a circular floor sculpture, four metres in diameter, densely packed in mesmerizing spirals with around 3,200 recovered clay roof tiles from the Mexican city of Puebla.
“I imagine the tiles being moved to a place where people need a new shelter from the rain,” says Missika of this piece that symbolises the passage of time
“I imagine the birth of rocks, lava spat out of volcanoes and cooling down on its path… millions of years of sedimentation, turning rocks into soil… red, water-saturated, soft mud drying in the sun and wind before being fired so hot that all the molecules transform into hard matter.”
The sculpture goes on to question what happens when these tiles lose their roofing function, becoming sleeping matter, thus changing their direction. ‘Outdoor to indoor and upside down,’ indicates the artist.
The question of time’s passage is equally present in a wall-mounted work incorporating Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, housed in a concrete shelf. By preserving the 20th-century classic in a fire- and waterproof material, this literary gem is kept safe for future generations.