He knows only what she knows that he knows, she knows only what he knows that she knows
Roman Romanovic as Asako Iwama at Minsk
West of East – An exhibition about Europe in 6 chapters
curated by Lena Prents with contributions by the Contemporary Art Study Center at the EHU Gallery Ӯ Minsk, Belarus
September 2012
There are two stories of knowing. One is the dialogue which happens within the membrane around two people, and the other is an imaginary scenario, though it is one not divisible from its surroundings.
In this fiction, a call is made to the people of Belarus for a subject-object repositioning. Does anyone want to be someone else? The positions of subjectivity around this call and response start from the context of an ex-Soviet industrial city, an Asian artist in Minsk for the first time and the transfers of expectation and understanding between one and one. Roman Romanovic answers a call in Minsk, and calls upon Asako Iwama. The course of their dialogue is an extended encounter between two that enacts the logic of subjectivity. The city gives the visitor a form of unanswerability, and what each may know is only a potential, the possibility of responding to one becoming the other.
He only knows what she knows that he knows, she knows only what he knows that she knows is a work that builds upon the subjective syntax of the earlier work Incorporation (2012). Can response here be a grammatical function of the other, where reaction becomes an entry towards identification?