Clare Gatto and Kara Güt, “Magic Circle” at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit

“Magic Circle” by Clare Gatto and Kara Güt, curated by Isabella Nimmo, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit, 09/11/2024 – 23/02/2025.

Exhibition Text:
In Magic Circle, collaborators Clare Gatto and Kara Güt present a constellation of multimedia and sculptural assemblages that give new aesthetic language to the hybrid nature of contemporary life. The exhibition uses references to popular video game vernacular and motifs to offer a portal to an “in-between” realm: a tangible yet ambiguous environment that embodies the porous and evolving duality between virtual and corporeal worlds. Within gaming culture, the term “magic circle” describes the moment in which the normal rules and reality or the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of the video game. Through the works on display, Gatto and Güt bend and transfer this idea to the material world. By building on elements of media studies and queer theory, the artists seek to simulate a momentary glitch in the system and disrupt the typical binary logics that guide and define us in the everyday. Magic Circle invites visitors to wander within the gray zone: a space to play with the dichotomies of the present and push against the limits of the real.