Rooms Magazine » Deus-Dei: Everyday Gods

Jul

24

2012

Deus-Dei: Everyday Gods

Are you a God? Do you know one? Do you even believe in God? Deus-Dei introduces you to the way of human power and asks you the question: What if God is Us and not Him?

Deus-Dei (Super-Ego) was the new show by Mr Adonay [Communication], in collaboration with Rooms Magazine and Canarias Crea Canarias, which just took place at Círculo de Bellas Artes, Tenerife, Spain.

God. What a word to be heard and followed – even pursued sometimes – from the very beginning of time, God was a control, limit and guide to so many cultures. The Deus-Dei exhibition goes underneath the word and presents the possibility of being Us and not Him. Curated by Adonay Bermudez, through the work of 13 artists in painting, photography, sculpture, collage, graffiti and video art they meditate on the human being as the origin of power and will.

However, if everyone could be a god and everyone seems to feel special, how many gods could we have?

Bart Jansen, author of the piece American Burka, answers: ‘I don’t believe in gods. I just see loads of people performing strange rituals. Religion gives people some hold on life but these beliefs allow people to permit all kinds of crimes towards dissenters.’

So, are human beings born to be bad? ‘People work so hard to try and make a better world for ourselves but we always get lots of nastiness on the side. We want to visit our grandmother and invent the combustion-engine to do so, generating pollution and dead animals on the road,’ claims Bart. Even his piece is a side effect of one of the main debates in North-western Europe: burka wearing.

It is amazing that a whole continent speaks about an outfit. However, it isn’t so incredible when this garment turns out to be a kind of meaningful flag. ‘I decided not to take sides in this discussion but offer some solutions and a pinch of fun,’ says Jansen.

So burka is the entrance to a way to meditation about how people are and how religions work. ‘The by-catch of religion is to be completely certain that your idea is the only correct one. You have to cancel out ideas that others might have. I like to pull those failures to the surface and play with them until the edges are soft again.’

For artist Eugenio Merino, there are no deities as we understand them. At least he assures us, to be more human than godlike. ‘I live in the permanent failure so I am totally a human.’ And humans, as he says, ‘are doomed to repeat failures of others as if they were ours. Changes are possible but it takes time. Changes are human actions developing little by little.’

Merino’s piece speaks about the balance of power: ‘A hand with barbed wire describes the impossibility of a victory without defeat, as there is no god without believers, and our society is full of believers, religious, political, economic and corporate”.

Society, mass, people, humans, minds and all that jazz; everything could be reduced to the anxiety of feeling lonely and ill-fitting in the dark emptiness surrounding us. And in this boiling reality of half-love half-hate, everyone wants to be the one and only. Or at least to have one.

By Ana Veiga

Deus-Dei (Super Ego) featured artists: