Rendezvous Problem 1: Incompleteness

Irina Gheorghe & Jiří Horák

7. 11. 2024, 18:00

AVU Veletržní, Veletržní 826/61, Praha 7

For the inaugural session of the series, astrophysicist Jiří Horák and artist Irina Gheorghe performatively guide the audience though several layers of incompleteness while exploring the halls and transitional spaces of the AVU Veletržní building. Jiří Horák delves into the concept’s manifestations in mathematics and physics, drawing from scientific perspectives that challenge conventional understandings of knowledge and certainty, and supported by an interlude on the imperfections of out-of-tune musical instruments. Irina Gheorghe explores the concept from an artistic perspective, drawing on a practice navigating the boundaries between the seen and the unseen. Through several site-specific interventions, she invokes a space of incompleteness as the inevitable condition of ephemeral events, which in their absence can only be accessed through ambiguity, imagination and imprecise assumptions.

Jiří Horák is a scientist working as a researcher at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the physics of accretion flows on neutron stars and black holes, high-energy radiation scattered by relativistic jets and on the strong gravitational lensing close to very compact objects. He is also interested in the resonant effects of orbital motion in strong gravitational fields and in nonlinear oscillations of accretion disks.

Irina Gheorghe is an artist working primarily with performance, in combination with installation, drawing, photography or video, to address the tensions inherent in the attempts to speak about things beyond our possibilities of observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Her work explores the notion of deviation as a technique of estranging the everyday, abstraction as a language for interstellar communication and the absurd as the mood of interaction to a world beyond perception.

The project is a cooperation between

The Academy of Fine Arts Prague / LARGE - Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education and Velrybí srdce, z.s