(catalogue text)
Our world is constituted by things. A thing is something in itself, something which can be isolated from other things, but at the same time be related to them. Things structure our perception and make us capable of manipulating our way through the world. Navigating in this world of things we do things in order to make things better and things happen all the time, sometimes even strange things. Working in the middle of everything we create things out of anything we find.
As a concept 'thing' covers everything, being the most abstract category for what can be met in the world. Yet, confronted with things like the ones exhibited here, when we try to reach an adequate comprehension, 'thing' reveals itself to be too narrow a concept. These things are not really things, but something else or something more, something that gives us an experience which, rather than forms a concept, leaves us with the impression that the thing as such is of less importance than what it expresses, and the way it impresses us.
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These things are made, but by their very form they make us wonder, whether they are really meant to appear as they now appear, or, they rather should be seen as an unwilled result of incidents created with intentions totally different from the traces they have left, almost accidentally. As incident they are created at certain times or rather during certain periods of time, incidental in relationship to the intention, but essential as a creating activity.
As traces of incidents happening at certain places they are parts of our spatial world. They are attractive in their very appearance, and as attractions they become signs moving us in ways different from verbal communication. As signs they enclose a meaning to be revealed, but this revealing activity does not take the form of a revelation. As signifying they signify something signified, a core of significance, impressed in and expressed by the signs, forcing the expressed meaning into us, where it leaves an impression too strong to be ignored.
The attraction of the natural smoothness, which makes us want to touch them, turns into disgust when we are confronted, not as spectators, but as living creatures approaching, with the repulsive smell of rot, revealing the inner core of death. As traces they lead us to something both fundamental and excremental, trying to communicate the accumulating activities of life, but expressing, by their very form of communication that this accumulation encloses its own contradiction.
As accumulations these things are created, but as excrements, in a way where we do not know whether they were intended to be what they are, or whether they were just left by somebody - or -thing - not knowing that they were something worth leaving. Still, we get the impression that they were created in order to be found exactly as accidental, but neccesary, traces of a creature-creator. As traces they attract our attention, not only to their own presence, but to something absent which passed by.
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Starting anew every once in a while, working for some time, giving it all up and leaving something behind only to start all over again, the activity expressed in these things is an attempt to create forms which can be touched and caressed into life, transforming through the tenderness of the hands accumulation into growth. This attempt to put life into layers of glue and paper, to make bodies out of corpses, is imitating life itself, imitating the creation of forms meant for disintegration, even though the resulting traces cannot be anything but imitations of imitations.
This activity repeats itself again and again by necessity and becomes ridiculous in and for itself, leaving the creature-creator regarding itself from the outside as a strange thing happening, a creature trying to express a form of expression not to be expressed. The attempt to transgress the limits of itself and the matter, it is trying to transform, is revealed to itself as a sign of vanity, leaving it with the clear conciousness of the futility of the activities, it is obsessed with, but without any information about, how to stop.
Obsessed with these impossible activities, and even more obsessed with its own obsession, the creature-creator leaves traces of obscenity, at the same time fascinating and appalling, incidental and yet essential. The obscene duality of these creations is communicated to us through the comfort of the surface and the stink emanating from the inside, signifying through coincidental attraction and repulsion both the necessity and the absurdity of the strife towards perfection.
Nothing justifies the creation of the traces left, and that is precisely the reason for leaving them as they are, unaccomplished and yet in some way signifying perfection. Sensing the physical attraction of the things, we get drawn into an insignificant, but impressing, universe where intuitions accumulate into an inner experience of the absurdity of life, disappearing the moment it is expressed, regardless of the form of the signifying sign. Meaningless and circular, nothing is accomplished by any of these activities; the only things left are the traces, material and insignificant.