Download the Catalogue PDF - Afgangs-undstillingen 2010

UK:
Reflections related
to my practice
or
On constructed reality,
the social paranoia of man
and his anxiety of the
social structures
In the realm between reality and fiction, there is a
tendency to draw a very sharp line which divides and
separates the two. Reality is one entity, while fiction is
another. Does this sharp line however exist? Isn’t everything
just a man-made construction? Reality becomes
fiction. Fiction becomes reality. It becomes a blurry
grey area in which reality and fiction are constantly
intertwining without clearly manifesting themselves. A
constructed reality emerges through this.
Once in a while reality crumbles up and becomes confusing,
dense, and impermeable. Does reality remain
the same, when you walk from one room to another?
Perhaps the world is not what one expected it to be,
when one opened a door and peeped through it. And
having walked through the door, entered and looked
back, does one see the world as one left it? Thus, the
reality of the individual can come to appear as a web
of mental states a map of the mind, that explicitly manifests
itself physically, in the individual’s surroundings
through his or her optics.
As an individuals our recognition of the world is a
completely subjective perception of the world and how
we view it. Through private experiences, curiousness,
explorations, and selective personal interpretations,
reality is constructed, as one and only one individual
perceives it. Reality, as the individual person perceives
it is different from one person to the next. The only
perception of reality that can be trusted is hence, our
own. However, as individuals we are constantly influenced
by other individuals, which influences the way
we recognize the world. And thus is the individual’s
reality transformed into a collectively perceived reality
which everybody has a congruence and effect upon.
Therefore, any individual who wants to be part of and
act within the commonly perceived reality, must fit, and
subject oneself to this reality’s values, in order for the
reality’s foundation to remain stable. This is not necessarily
a conscious choice or a choice at all, but more of
an unconscious submitting to the social norms.
The individual’s subjective conscience is thus being
influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by
his parents’ values, other people’s values in the social
sphere, society’s general values, the rhetoric of these
people, the media and politicians. This contributes to
the creation of the individual as a person, and creates
invisible social structures that the individual automatically
acts within. But through this constant flow of
exogenous impressions and influences that influences
how the individual recognizes reality it is possible to be
influenced in a direction that cannot always be said to
be positive. We do not necessarily have any actual control
of the social structures that we are born and raised
into. Even though one might like to, it is impossible not
to be influenced by these social structures.
As a human being it is not certain that one can disregard
these exogenous influences and they will implicitly
and unknowingly be imbedded in the individual. Even
though one can rationally and consciously separate
and filter the way one wishes to perceive reality, as well
as how one acts and relates to other individuals, these
imbedded influences – in which light we view others,
the rhetoric about one thing or the other – will surface
and sway one’s analysis and interpretation of different
situations in one way or the other, as well as one’s
perception of reality.
The social paranoia manifests itself and occurs in the
moment it is realized that one has been unconsciously
influenced by social structures taking shape as prejudices
and biased opinions about people or events that
unconsciously influences one in another direction than
one would normally and rationally prefer. It is in such
conflicts between conscious and unconscious positions
that tensions arise and enable invisible structures
to become visible for the individual. Who are you as
an individual: as a person? Is it even possible as an
individual to have any control over who you are and
which circumstances help to shape you? These questions
raises new questions such as: What can I, as an
individual even do if “I am not the person that I want to
be, and thought I was”, if there is some sort of exogenous
power or structure that is completely beyond my
control, which may have an influence upon who I am as
a person, individual, and human being?
In the schism between the conscious and unconscious
values lies a general anxiety about these social
structures which is embedded in the recognition of
the fact that as an individual, one is deeply influenced
by all other individuals who constantly influence and
move one’s perception of reality, and that one does not
necessarily have any control over this.