GRAIN OF SALT – EYE-RHYMES OF SEALESSNESS (2017)
– prokaryote precariat –
opening with Dominika Trapp Rijeka, SKC Gallery, Rijeka
The discipline of biology came of age during the second half of the 19th century, while emerging nation states were filing confronting claims to territorial authority and knowledge.
The spawning network of biological stations started to colonize the last untamed realm of the seas, subjugating it to science and national imagination. Rijeka/ Fiume constituted Hungary’s only coastal town, considering the whole topos of the sea and the harbour, from diplomacy and science to literature and cuisine.
Grain of Salt – Eye-rhymes of Sealessness focuses on the entanglements of nationalism in the natural sciences and political myth-making in the turbulent era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and after its dissolution. The empire aspired to become a maritime power and join the global game, an ostentatious desire that Hungary maintained long after the loss of its connection to the sea.
Grain of Salt consists of three major parts: Grids over Waves – a Sisyphean attempt to categorize the social representations of the sea, Rhymes, on
the borders of language, art and science and The Compass.