Inner School of Open Studies

by Protey Temen

A) Contents

B) Exhibitions

C) About

RELATIVE EXPLANATIONS

A cycle of works unfolds across crumpled chalkboards, albums, notebooks, video projections, and spatial surfaces covered with cursive notes, hurried handwriting, indecipherable formulas and signatures, schematic sketches, maps, and graphs — all merging to reveal a pattern of layered interpretation.

“Imagine yourself coming into the classroom 90 minutes late for a lecture. The professor is absorbed in explanation. Nobody’s talking – it’s very difficult to manage to take notes, let alone analyse them. We’re following an invisible hand and pretend to have been there all the time. Tomorrow we are supposed to retell the lecture. How can we retell things we didn’t even manage to understand? The notes are useless. But my interpretation is the fruit of my perception. Do I deserve to have an opinion after all? But the retelling is intended for the asker and his opinion can be different. How should I retell what I understood without being mistaken? Or maybe I have the right to make a mistake?”

Pages

Drawing

Individual sheets with drawings, silhouettes of parts of figures or unrecognizable objects imprinted on them as if faded in the sunlight. Random signatures on the sheets look as if they were arranged on the layout of the book, but on the other hand, they are enlarged fragments of chalkboards.

Brown Cards

Drawing

The precise lines, circles and mathematical figures evoke the feeling of technical drawings or blueprints. They seem to express geometric relationships, probably exploring some architectural or procedural concept.

Signs

Drawing, Object

“Relative Explanations” cycle. “Signs” series, 2023. Black paperboard, white chalk, white pencil, machine-cut arrangements. Various sizes.

Flakes

Series of Artworks

This series unfolds around archaeological finds, caves, relics, and magic. Debris, flakes of cultural layers, stapled or pseudo-documentary digital images, and hallucinations of outdated algorithms.

Structures of the Sky: Clouds

Drawing

Clusters of clouds and the tensions between them, sun glare and light dust flying in the air. The constant movement of units of the sky when observed for long periods of time can exhibit an ordered, mathematically calibrated structure.

Blackboards

Drawing

A series of drawings from a fragment of an endless blackboard, layers of someone’s ideas, stories and sequential systems are captured by the frame of the paper format, suggesting the lack of boundaries of the original blackboard.

Books

Drawing, Albums

Sometimes like study notes, notebooks with homework, other times like textbooks, blurred in time. The floating scale of the records makes them seem as if they are too close to your face, or as if they are dissolving into the distance.

 

Surfaces

Canvas, Installation

Walls and floors, wooden frame structures covered with layers of black primed canvases or sections of paper rolls, with chalk and pencil drawings on the surfaces.

Canvas Documents

Drawing, Canvas, Object

Soft, cloth documents folded several times, as if some kind of record. Stapled in sets, separate sheets, tables or records, charts or sketches.

 

Blackboard Structures

Drawing, Object

Layers of black matte canvas, white pencil, chalk, and staples. Various sizes. 2021—Ongoing

Video Explanations

Multimedia

Video documentation of sequential explanation, manifesting notes, graphs and sequences. A set of 120 individual fragments is played back in random order, reproducing the effect of surprise each time.

Total Timeline

Drawing

We tend to think the moment is almost invisible by the common human perception of time because of the tiny amount of space it’s taking on a timeline. Therefore, our culture is often split in half by the question: should we rely on the moment or not, if it’s that notably small? By combining the ‘Mapping of the Emptiness’ and ‘Relative Explanations’ methods, daily used in the Inner School of Open Studies, we can zoom in and freeze one random moment for a few days. Probably, it will allow us to make some assumptions about what is happening between of reaching and leaving the moment.

Schematic Slideshow

Drawing, Projection

A light installation in the form of a scheme-explanation made on three sheets of paper and overlapping projection. A beam of light highlights a particular fragment of the surface, revealing, like a method of footnotes in the margins, the details hidden in the drawing. Randomness is inherent in the behavior of the catching light, leading the attention from element to element.

Wave Structures Album

Drawing, Album

A 12-page album devoted to the documentation and description of the individual parts of the wave, the dynamics of development, some patterns of directional change and fragility. The notes around the edges of the sheet make it difficult to make a thorough guess as to what specific type of wave this wave is, what you need to know about it, and how to treat it.

Notebooks of Relations

Drawing, Albums

…a profound exploration of speculative models, realized through a series of hundreds of small intuitive schematic drawings. Through the process of sketching, the elusive point of emptiness, the delicate frame of the moment, and the naive map depicted. These set of dozens of drawings serve as a gateway to understanding the intricate ways in which these ephemeral concepts can manifested and formalized.