Open Secrets

The core visual element of Open Secrets by Isabella Fürnkäs is a video collage which is projected (through video mapping) onto an enclosure that is pyramid in shape. The object given its size, a height of 150cm, so that the top of the work approaches the neck of many viewers as well as its stance resting directly on the floor recalls an intimate dwelling, specifically the structure of a tent. The surface onto which the video is projected is a patchwork of monochrome silk switches that appear as skins sewn together to stretch over the stainless-steel polls that shape the triangular contour of the sculpture. Taken together the work, like other installations by Fürnkäs, uses the “cut up” to evoke the deeply psychoanalytic motifs of child, the other, the clown or the insane but the work is not strictly inward looking.

The title refers perhaps to knowledge withheld, a secret, but one that is also known to the other hence being open or simply poorly kept - as might be the case with a child. Given the tent’s rudimentary structure it too could be the creation of a child but its complete refinement belies its sophistication of a mature working mind. Fürnkäs use of styling here is the highest degree of finesse; it is marked by every move in the installation being fine-tuned to finish. Yet it is not as some minimalist precursors a fetish polished finish it is instead juxtaposed with a sense of the badly made or slapped together even in the crude stitching barbaric.

The video collage has moments of close crop of a mouth and tongue – a displacement of subjecthood onto objecthood along with other images – fingers, flesh, water, hands zoomed to fingernails all equally displaced from the body they are attached to. Fürnkäs knows the tropes of psychoanalysis in art and has long disgusted the surrealist and much later post-modern feminist critism that has kept this modality valid by strongly critiquing it as patriarchal in nature. More so in returning pleasure to the inner subject of the female her work also looks outward to the contours of self and inorganic non-self, true to a motif of the nature culture divide that concerns her work. In a final hidden moment of the installation, a single photograph of The British Crown Jewels is stitched into a pouch on the back of the tent - for the artist it is “a symbol of power lying directly under your skin”.

- Text by Justin Polera