The Glass Bead GameTaking its title from Hermann Hesse’s novel, The Glass Bead Game weaves together interrelated fictions that form a landscape of broken connections. Signposting the way are images and objects colluding to form an entropic trail that define a restless territory of creative knowledge.

Hesse’s novel, set in the future, tells a narrative of a monastic protagonist who plays a highly aesthetic game. The game integrates all fields of human and cosmic knowledge – sacred geometry, alchemy, hieroglyphics, mythology, harmonics, arithmetic, astronomy and magic. The Glass Bead Game is the artistic, philosophical or cosmological manipulation of the symbolic forms that express these systems of knowledge. Once initiated into this system we can read hieroglyphs, alchemical texts or Gothic cathedrals; The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of culture.

The exhibition aims to be a polysemic constellation that evokes and fuses the real with the imaginary: delicate drawings, wax sculptures, botanical collage, esoteric busts, appropriated imagery and found material are manipulated with transformative effect. The artists relish in the degradation of the known and the perversion of a rational culture. Parallel worlds collide in the extrapolation of consumption and exchange that seek to look critically at the present. We encounter blueprints of personal visions that allow us to imagine how the sediments of our culture might otherwise be seen.

curated | Alun Rowlands & Matthew Williams
 
temporarysite.org | the glass bead game