HilbertRaum Berlin presents
Eternally Unfinished
Works by Juan Arata

We might sometimes believe we finally know ourselves but there is always a part of us that is destined to remain unconscious. We dramatically unfold our shadows in the search of our future “I” but we fall into fixation, believing there is an answer in the definition -in the in-formation. We know more and more but we understand less and less until Experience teaches us something new about ourselves. We know what we were but we ignore what we will be and so we remain Eternally Unfinished. In this exhibition Juan Arata explores some notions of the unconscious self.

HilbertRaum, Reuterstr. 31 12047 Berlin. 5th – 15th June 2020.  www.hilbertraum.org

Hadrian was Roman Emperor from 117 to 138. He is often included among the Empire’s “Five Good Emperors”, a “benevolent dictator”; Hadrian’s own senate found him remote and authoritarian. He has been described as enigmatic and contradictory, with a capacity for both great personal generosity and extreme cruelty and driven by insatiable curiosity, self-conceit, and ambition, but what most interest me from him is that Hadrian remains to be to today, the Roman with more representations ever.
How we create Memories? How we create images? This work is a visual analogy to how our brain perceives our past: we create layers and layers of information up to the point we cannot anymore reach the deepest layers. Through the accumulation of Information (from Latin “to-give-form) we reconstruct shallow images but we can never leave the surface to have access to the real depths of our own history. What is the value of accumulation?

As a kid it was difficult for me to understand why a circle has 360° and not 400° or why the day is divided into 24 hours (and its further divisions into minutes and seconds) and not into 40 hours. I guess my mind was not as arbitrary as my school teacher who couldn’t answer my question. This work is a study on Sumerian geometry and their interpretation of the stars, their search for a Divine symmetry and the remaining of an unknown and hidden code which relates the circle with the day, the center (angles) with the perimeter, the singularity and the vacuum: everything and nothing at the same time.

I always had an attraction to old carpets. As a child I was amazed by its geometries and patterns. It was as if some invisible force would draw me to them. This force was so great that I decide to study them and little by little I discover a world of old wisdom and encoded messages from the past containing cosmological views and all kind of esoteric content. This work is the first of a series of rugs exploring the meaning of patterns and geometry and how this knowledge is trespassed from generation to generation encoded into daily-objects designs.