The Works Are Fine. The Exhibition Is the Problem.

Lately, I find myself weary of exhibitions built around the familiar logic of putting things in their “right” place: carefully selected, carefully lit, carefully balanced, each work given the appropriate amount of space and attention so that it can be properly appreciated. Group exhibitions in particular seem increasingly trapped in this kind of competence. Everything works. Everything is where it should be. And somehow, nothing much is at stake.

What exactly does it mean to appreciate a work? What does it mean to make good art? To present something well? And how long can these things remain meaningful before they become merely professional virtues?

I’m not sure there is any answer left that could hold recent art together. Novelty has become routine. So has contemporaneity. Fashion, trends, opportunities, occasions, speed, accessibility, visibility, virality — all of them have become so readily available that they’ve lost much of their urgency. The mechanisms for making something seem relevant have themselves become commonplace.

Perhaps this is why I’m now looking for things that have escaped urgency. Works that have hardly been seen. Works that were shown once and then disappeared. Works that have been around long enough to have missed several definitions of what it means to be “current”. Works stubborn enough not to need to be rescued, updated, contextualised, or made to look as though they belong together.

This exhibition is an attempt to bring some of them into the same space without solving the problem of how they should coexist. It will remain unfinished until the very last day. The final work will be installed at the finissage, when the exhibition is, technically, already over.

There will be no carefully conceived hanging plan. No optimal sequence, no calculated rhythm, no attempt to make every work benefit from the work beside it. A work will go where there is room for it.

Not the best place.

Not the most logical place.

Just a place.

We have become so accustomed to the choreography of exhibitions — to the discreet calculations behind what goes where, what meets what, what is given space and what is allowed to speak — that perhaps the greatest risk is no longer a bad installation. Perhaps it is that we have become too good at recognising a good one.

What happens if we stop helping the works so much? Is it enough to put them in the gallery and let them be?

Without composing the room. Without making it coherent. Without making it beautiful.

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The exhibition can be visited by appointment while it is still becoming. Its official opening — and finissage — will take place on October 29.