For his solo exhibition, Colombian-born, Norway-based artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña, created a multi-sensory, immersive experience, building a large scale pavilion inside the gallery walls. Built as a space within a space the work invites the viewers to experience an ever changing environment.
The work takes inspiration from the Caspian region and the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, a man whose life was dedicated to draw relations between distant places on Earth, and who used norse mythology in order to theorise that Scandinavians descend from people that used to live in what today is Azerbaijan in his widely contested hypothesis The Search for Odin. The title of the exhibition, Sleipnir, refers to the god Odin's eight-legged horse, which some claim might in fact signify a ship, or vessel, while some claim it signifies an arachnid insect like a scorpion.
The central text in the performative sequence of the work is further inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story The Aleph. This story describes an object where one can see every place on earth from every single angle at the same time. Here the adaptation ends with Gómez-Egaña's narration of a house which was built as a seemingly heroic gesture by a man to his wife, and was later found to be infested with scorpions. Here, Gómez-Egaña draws further parallels between Heyerdahl's life and his own.
Quasi-scientific and often contradictory tales of adventure and heroism permeate the fabric of a world that has always been fantasised as being, mythologically or technologically, more interconnected that what its geography allows. Sleipnir opens up a web of narratives that focus on the private and subtle as ways to bend and fold these impossible geographies. In doing so, this exhibition contests the immutable figure of the male hero and acknowledges the poetic as a vehicle of history.
Exhibition generously supported by Bakcell, as part of M.A.P. Festival.
With special thanks to the Norwegian Embassy in Azerbaijan and ILAB Limited Liability Company.