You were annotating the idea of a long elastic present that could include violence and passivity and patience as well as cities, as would a crystal of quartz.
You played every card; you had your reasons.
You were being internally photographed.
– Cinema of the Present, Lisa Robertson
To roam the margins is to play with the tension between what is imperceptible and what can be actualised. It can induce a sense of indeterminacy, a paralysis brought about by seeing life’s antagonism from multiple perspectives. It is a risky practice to fall out of sync with contemporary impulses for production and performance – one can get stuck and struggle to re-emerge. And yet, it also presents itself as an opportunity for world-building. Moments of latency allow for processes of maintenance, necessary for recovery. Such processes can occur when you wake up in the middle of the night and try to guess if the sky has already changed colour; a speculative potential to see gaps in the shifting grounds of the present.
This margin will be your vantage point looks at liminal states and moments of suspension in everyday language, through works that interlace urban imaginaries and personal spaces. Operating at the meeting point between bodies, psychological states, architectural interiors, and urban realities, the exhibition investigates subtle gestures and brief interruptions that create staging-grounds for the negotiation of daily protocols.
The seven artists in this exhibition offer worldviews that are both familiar and skewed, challenging our perception of the environments we inhabit. Some artworks offer pathways into moments of ecological and personal uncertainty (Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin). Others uncover the constraints imposed by urban socio-economic systems, staging rooms where the body can loosen (Alice dos Reis, Julie Becker). Disembodied feelings and images from virtual spaces morph into architectures to be sensed differently (Hanne Lippard, Sebastian Jefford) while fantastical machines become portals (Magali Reus) and the floor a contact zone for dialogues on otherness (Ndayé Kouagou). As a clear distinction between physical and mental states blurs, different layers of social reality emerge. These artists not only outline the limits imposed by social and economic structures from intimate perspectives; they also engage in a world-making process, offering viewpoints on the complex negotiation of the self within ever-changing landscapes.
The interstitial – that which is situated within but also in a separate segment – could be a temporary refuge, a mode of refusal, or a potential to change perspective and review the parameters that shape bodies and given realities.
