Peak of Eternal Light at Barakat Seoul

Jorge Mañes Rubio: Peak of Eternal Light

Wednesday, May 2–Sunday, June 10, 2018

Opening May 2, 6-8pm

Barakat Seoul is holding Peak of Eternal Light, an exhibition of the work of Spanish artist Jorge Mañes Rubio (b. 1984), from Wednesday, May 2 to Sunday, June 3. As an artist, Jorge Mañes Rubio has investigated themes of vanishing civilization and shamanism from an ethnographic standpoint, focusing on forgotten places and stories that are given new meaning in his work. His experiments transcend the bounds of art to offer alternative perspectives on issues of politics, society, and the environment.

The works in Peak of Eternal Light, which is taking place as part of Barakat Seoul’s support program for young artists, focus on traces of forgotten ancient civilizations within modern society, repositioning and reconfiguring them on the alternative future stage represented by the Moon. In 2016, Mañes Rubio began an art residency program with the European Space Agency (ESA), envisioning a future civilization for human settlement of the moon. As seen in Peak of Eternal Light, the spaces he proposes combine technology with mythology, lunar exploration with ancient civilization. Starting from an imagined narrative involving the creation of a new civilization to colonize the Moon, the exhibition unfolds around the satellite’s south pole at Shackleton Crater, which is noted as receiving some of the moon’s greatest exposure to sunshine. With his attempt to build a new human civilization for lunar settlement, the artist realizes the utopian human dream of venturing beyond Earth into space’s endless expanse.

In pondering the question of what kind of culture the future lunar settlers will have, the author harks back ironically to the civilizations of the past – once splendid, but now subsumed into the faded pages of history. The artist’s perspective in finding the basis for cultivating a lunar civilization in ancient societies is both a process of anthropological exploration into the origins of human existence and an opportunity to underscore how unfathomably small humans are within the infinitude of space.

Barakat Seoul
58-4, Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
T. +82 2 730 1949 F. +82 2 733 1949
Email: contact@barakatgallery.com