IM-POSSIBILITY is a way to re-think our approach to art and an invitation to experience it and engage with it in a new de-centralised manner. An international Tour of happenings will take place around the world in the months of September – November 2021, where 22 international artists from very different backgrounds, cultures and generations will be reflecting on IM-POSSIBILITY while curating his/her events in their respective locations. The documented events will come together on this website, which will be gradually populated with content as the happenings take place.
‘IM-POSSIBILITY’ was born during the first Parisian lockdown in March 2020. Suddenly everything stopped and we had to turn the gaze inside. The introspection began. And with it, the transformation: not only of the individual, but the entire system. The way art was displayed and consumed was questioned, we had to rethink the idea of the museum, of the exhibition, of the way artists and audiences engage with art.
The idea of ‘IM-POSSIBILITY’ is that everything is contained inside us, all the potential, all the possibilities. And often the only obstacle that stands between the realisation of that possibility is ourselves, our egos, our fears. Once we look within, we start seeing each darkness revealing the light, each confinement holding the key, each fragility allowing the strength, each end containing a beginning. All we need to realise this inner potential is the courage to transcend our ego, the “IM”, and open our imagination to start the transformation and create things yet unimaginable, yet undreamt of, yet unexperienced, but ultimately possible.
In the spirit of re-imagining the traditional exhibition approach, IM-POSSIBILITY will be dispersed in multiple locations all over the world, each work being presented in its most organic context decided by the artist (public spaces, private homes, out in the nature, artists’ studios, cellars, universities, community centers, galleries, etc.). The single openings will take place in Berlin, Moscow, Johannesburg, Cairo, Sfax, Antananarivo, Bulawayo, Los Angeles, Dakar, Brussels, Medellin, Paris, Pointe à Pitre, Montreal within the period of September – November 2021. It’s a show impossible to see all together, but it’s made possible by every single artist curating their own piece (I am the possibility!), engaging local audiences and communities.
‘IM-POSSIBILITY’ becomes an inspiration for the multiple “I”s to come together and transform the impossibility of this moment into a possibility of something new. It is there to remind us that we only have to look inside ourselves to find the key for our personal and collective spiritual awakening.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The title for this exhibition was born in June 2018, right after I inaugurated ‘IM-PERFECTION’ in Berlin. I carried it inside me, a child screaming to be born and yet no way to get out. No time, no space, no budget. Impossible. It has been filled with so many emotions, nuances, faces, experiences, thoughts, fragilities ever since. It grew. Its shape, its awareness. The internal necessity to exorcise it and get rid of the “IM”, of the ego, of the obstacle between the possible and myself. Then came March 2020, the Parisian confinement. Suddenly everything stopped and those of us with the eyes open had to turn the gaze inside. A big mirror was put up in front of every single human being. The introspection began. And with it, the transformation. For what is the transformation, if not a dance of existence, a constant movement based on the tension of the opposites, a perpetual cycle of life and death, of metaphorically killing some energies to liberate others? The laws of physics, the most poetic and symbolic science of all, tell us that everything already exists and energies don’t go anywhere, but are in constant transformation.
In alchemy, the first stage of transformation is nigredo, sometimes alluded to as a descent into the dark world of the unconscious, “the black blacker than black”, the journey within, where the union of the opposites is killed only to restore life, triumph over death and resurrect in the next stage, albedo, “the daybreak” and then on to rubedo, “the sunrise”, liberating and transforming energies along the way. Symbolically, alchemy could be about transmuting the basic lead of ego into the gold of soul. In “Psychology and Alchemy” Jung wrote “The real goal of alchemy is unknown” and according to him “is to be sought less in the philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators.” In other words, there is no absolute truth or absolute “gold”, no single correct universal method, we are the alchemists of our own existence and all the magic tools to find our own philosophical stone and achieve our Opus Magnum are contained inside us.
Once we look within, we start seeing our multiple reflections, each darkness revealing the light, each confinement holding the key, each conviction based on doubt, each fragility allowing the strength, each end containing a beginning. All we need to realise this inner potential is the courage to transcend our ego, the “IM”, and open our imagination and inner light to create things yet unimaginable, yet undreamt of, yet unexperienced, but ultimately
possible.
“One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality — oneself — which
is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be
here again… It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to
know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light…..
It is a mighty heritage, it is a human heritage, and it is all there is to trust.”
– James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
‘IM-POSSIBILITY’. Think about this word, the tensions that inhabit it, the duality of the external and internal, the body and the gaze, the constant struggle of master and slave, one impossible without the other, of victimism and activism, of free will and determinism, of writing the history instead of reading someone else’s version of it, of personal rises and falls, loves and hates, demons and angels, temptations and resistances, doubts and certainties, indulgences and constraints, fears and confrontations, hopes and disappointments, guilt and pleasures, life and death, rational and irrational, visible and invisible. It’s the ultimate ode to the human spirit, to its potential to transform, create, resurrect, resist, rebel, reinvent, evolve, reclaim, rethink.
As I write this, we are being confined all over the world. My invitation to the contributors of this exhibition is to reflect on this extraordinary time of constraint, isolation, immobility, impossibility and express what IM-POSSIBILITY means to them as human beings, as artists, as citizens, at this moment of time and beyond.
In his “Letters to a Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it… How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
This exhibition is a symbolic alchemical process, where 20 international artists transform this historical moment into the possibility of spiritual awakening, personal and collective, through the encounter of individual stories told with courage, imagination and grace.
Elena Korzhenevich, Paris, April 26th, 2020.
Find out more about the project and participating artists on im-possibility.com, designed by the multi-talented Amira Parree.
