Dormant Body

Dormant Body is a solo exhibition by Brussels-based artist Yoel Pytowski, created in the wake of his voluminous site-specific installation The Porous Lodge at Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp during the fall of 2024. Pytowski radically reconfigured the exhibition space, constructing an entirely new architecture within the already existing one. This transformation included a new storey, staircase, inner walls, passages, and even a concrete facade, redefining 450 m3. After the exhibition closed last December, Pytowski meticulously dismantled the installation, preserving every board, wooden beam, and fragment in a haunting act of reverse creation—a process he applies to each of his installations—unbuilding what had been so carefully constructed, yet retaining its presence in material form. Ten weeks after the end of the exhibition at Kunsthal Extra City, Dormant Body at Komplot offers Pytowski the opportunity to fulfill a long-held aspiration: to capture his practice in a moment of rest. Here, the materials from The Porous Lodge enter a state of hibernation—a quiet latency, suspended between past labor and future mutations. For Pytowski, this marks the first time showcasing the materials he has been continuously reusing for over a decade in their halted state. These construction elements—wooden planks and beams, plaster boards, bags of cement, and scraps of wood—are inventoried with obsessive precision, sorted by type, size, and shape. Stacked and grouped, they become sculptures, their austerity evoking a particular aesthetic sensibility. Resting on wooden pallets that act as sculptural pedestals, these objects balance practical necessity with conceptual rigor, revealing the artist’s profound relationship with his materials and emphasizing his care and attention to their reuse. A certain dissensus is at play here—bare and perceivably modest, Pytowski renders materials that are usually hidden and not meant to be seen, and the complex processes of their existence, visible. It is not only this aspect, however, that holds true to Pytowski’s proposition. The work is considered as a living organism—one that adapts and expands from place to place, retaining and absorbing its experiences from every modification. Despite its static and meticulous nature, it is clearer than ever that the constellation of materials is in fluid movement, one that requires a moment to breathe before it moves on and grows. In Dormant Body, Pytowski invites us to consider the tension between the utilitarian function of these materials and their potential as sculptural forms. What might initially appear as an inventory—a mimicry of an artist’s stockroom in his studio—becomes a statement on continuity, care, and sustainability. These materials are not just physical objects, they serve as vessels of memory—imbued with traces of Pytowski’s past installations while remaining poised for future transformation.