Contemporary Intersects
13 DECEMBER T/M 5 JANUARI | 12:00 – 18:00
Contemporary Intersects explores different strata comprising our contemporary reality—or rather, it questions the possible intersections between various ensembles and spaces.
The starting point of the project is Gordon Matta-Clark’s monumental work “Office Baroque,” an intervention in the architecture of a building, of which only photographic and filmic traces remain today. This work, while resonating with the Loods 6 building and its spaces, enacts a radical transgression of our perception.
How can we speak of transgression when it is not a matter of moral transgression?
Rather, it concerns crossing or overflowing what is posited as a boundary for our senses—specifically, for hearing and sight.
It is also, and perhaps more precisely, about fracturing. The fracturing of what is not supposed to break allows us to hear or see differently.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s work literally cuts through a building, like an architect-sculptor stripped of the materiality that typically accompanies sculpture. The building is hollowed out, emptied, and pierced along contours that seem at once governed by the most rigorous geometry and the appearance of perfect arbitrariness. Only a general view makes it possible to understand its purpose.
This act reverses the act of seeing. Matta-Clark’s action becomes the work itself. The film shows us an action whose result is no longer visible: the building has been destroyed.
As in Conical Intersect (1975), it is the act of seeing that transgresses, crosses, and transforms the materiality of the building, reconnecting different spaces and scales. The act of seeing reveals something incomprehensible, if not monstrous, about our existence in the world: how can the unassignable interiority of an individual and the world that unfolds in complete exteriority ever come together? Through our gaze, which reverses not only inside and outside but also intimate, private time and shared, public time.
In “Office Baroque,” the gaze traverses space in unusual ways—ways that were previously impossible in the usual use of space. In this way, Matta-Clark transgresses the logic of the senses, exposing the monstrosity of the act of seeing, which brings together the invisible nature of the most intimate gaze with the exteriority of the world and its constructed spaces.
By projecting the shadow of vast foliage onto the ground, “Invisible Presence” literally opens up the space, abolishing the walls of the exhibition area. In Theis Wendt’s installation, the transgression or reversal here is not of up and down, but of depth and surface.
What is evoked is not so much the shadow of foliage, but the trees and light that produce it. Just as the thing precedes the word, presence exceeds representation. The installation creates a monumental off-screen space, on the scale of the world. The gap between the evoked presence and what is visible evokes a world of strange tones— a world buried or past, imbued with a strange nostalgia. With the slow quivering of leaf shadows, the entire surface of the world vibrates.
We find ourselves in a world beyond our contemporary times, after society has collapsed—where only invisible trees and sun are perceptible through shadows.
Yet there is no hidden truth in the depths of the sky. In line with Deleuze’s reflections in The Logic of Sense, the search for meaning no longer becomes a search for a “deeper meaning” hidden beneath visible appearances. Here, through these projections, all depth is brought to the surface—there is no depth or invisibility outside of what is present on the surface.
With his installation “Topia,” Zalán Szakács questions these notions by confronting us with the vision of immaterial screens interwoven through space, made perceptible by light and haze. What he questions are the very notions of surface and projection. The surfaces of the screens themselves are dissolved, no longer a material support that stops the light and allows us to perceive projected images. They become images themselves—constituted by light—and now imbricated in the depth of space. The screens become thresholds, fractures of light, opening onto suspended spaces where perception wavers.
In Under Boom, Louis Braddock Clarke makes the fracturing of the world audible. His installation plunges us into the deep murmurs of the Earth, where the inaudible becomes vibration and time—resonance. From an island in the middle of the Atlantic, the distant sounds of the planet, captured and recorded as infrasound—air strikes, calving ice sheets, seismic guns, etc.—are amplified, becoming sonic signs of the disturbances and crises of our time. Sound becomes a trace inscribed in our disrupted ecosystems. The installation acts as a listening station, a sensitive point where the deep vibrations of the world and the traces of our history intertwine, thus opening up the possibility for a different kind of listening and a different experience of the world.
Each of the four works in the exhibition represents a transgression or reversal of our way of perceiving and understanding the world. Each work designates different spaces, crosses and transforms them, and at their intersection, questions the possibility of a shared world.
These four works connect us to the urgent and necessary nature of a collective perception, at the intersection of the multiple contemporary spaces we inhabit.