Sinking Islands
14 Jul - 31 Aug 2012
SINKING ISLANDS
Curated by Vincent Normand
14 July - 31 August 2012
With Katinka Bock, Etienne Chambaud, Hernán Díaz, Fabien Giraud, Karl Holmqvist, The Institute for Figuring, Nicholas Mangan.
« Sinking islands. Like the unseen part of the buildings made of fictions that form the airborne continents on which we stand. Like that day when reading happened without spelling or writing without singing—that day when text slipped inside the body of things.
The matter at hand is: things alone in the world. Much more than signs or stories, Sinking Islands puts in place a repertoire of gestures literally without sources, producing a series of negative marks: cuts, lapidations, measures, coverings, blindings, confinements, erosions, falls, rips, inserts, seams, meshing, collages and bindings. In this exhibition we will be able to isolate slices, in a necessarily unstable way: a body of sand; blind fish that witness a transaction; a pile-up of animal scruffs (superimposed cuts); a torn atlas that is mended right away by threads that form other geometric sutures; the eschatological story of an apocalypse under a vitrine; an alphabet in pieces that the wall has not contained; sediments in repose, sediments caught during their fall; a cut throat; a cry. In the book accompanying the exhibition, we will see these figures fold out onto the space of writing.
Sinking Islands is thus configured by untied gestures and by forms without referents: gestures that do not add strata of signs to the giant palimpsest of our fictions, but that mark them with cuts as straight as a razorblade as a tentative to re-inscribe the objects in the world. The exhibition’s objects delimit an edge to the present of their experience. This margin separates us from that which we are no longer. It defines the value of that which cannot be given back. Sinking Islands is made up exclusively of splinters, without anything splintering. The matter at hand is: things that resist discourse, things that cut our tongues, and for which we have no words—things whose only spectator is savage. »
Curated by Vincent Normand
14 July - 31 August 2012
With Katinka Bock, Etienne Chambaud, Hernán Díaz, Fabien Giraud, Karl Holmqvist, The Institute for Figuring, Nicholas Mangan.
« Sinking islands. Like the unseen part of the buildings made of fictions that form the airborne continents on which we stand. Like that day when reading happened without spelling or writing without singing—that day when text slipped inside the body of things.
The matter at hand is: things alone in the world. Much more than signs or stories, Sinking Islands puts in place a repertoire of gestures literally without sources, producing a series of negative marks: cuts, lapidations, measures, coverings, blindings, confinements, erosions, falls, rips, inserts, seams, meshing, collages and bindings. In this exhibition we will be able to isolate slices, in a necessarily unstable way: a body of sand; blind fish that witness a transaction; a pile-up of animal scruffs (superimposed cuts); a torn atlas that is mended right away by threads that form other geometric sutures; the eschatological story of an apocalypse under a vitrine; an alphabet in pieces that the wall has not contained; sediments in repose, sediments caught during their fall; a cut throat; a cry. In the book accompanying the exhibition, we will see these figures fold out onto the space of writing.
Sinking Islands is thus configured by untied gestures and by forms without referents: gestures that do not add strata of signs to the giant palimpsest of our fictions, but that mark them with cuts as straight as a razorblade as a tentative to re-inscribe the objects in the world. The exhibition’s objects delimit an edge to the present of their experience. This margin separates us from that which we are no longer. It defines the value of that which cannot be given back. Sinking Islands is made up exclusively of splinters, without anything splintering. The matter at hand is: things that resist discourse, things that cut our tongues, and for which we have no words—things whose only spectator is savage. »