Do you betray the singularity of historical events by inserting them into the narrative of History? If so, is there a possible form for presenting them that does not reduce their heterogeneity to sameness? High-caliber philosophical questions like these form the background to Sophie Tottie’s midcareer retrospective, an ambitious exhibition collecting works made between 1993 and 2007. The show includes a number of Tottie’s signature pieces: installations that employ text, video, and painting to evoke past events, forgotten sciences, and abandoned utopias without revealing their sources or references. At times, elements can be deciphered. In the impressive Isolario, 2005, a text-based work that occupies center stage here, references to Kepler are crossed with iconic images from Tiananmen Square; in the video installation Einstein RGB, 2001, the sound track tells stories of the Soviet space program, and the first female cosmonaut, and so on. In other works, one could claim that complexity verges on obscurity, but Tottie makes a serious case for the virtues of frustrating the viewer. “The force of the works resides in the fact that they do not write out . . . their points of departure,” she says in an interview in the show’s catalogue. This does not mean that she thinks her artworks will be violated by discursive ramifications. Rather, the suppression of information, of contextualizing narrative, here can be seen as part of a strategy to restore the honor of the historical event: Tottie’s works attempt to open a space where phenomena of the past can be experienced in their uniqueness, not only as fragments of a master story.
