“Out of Place” is a group show featuring works by Vikram Divecha, Mohammed Kazem, :mentalKLINIK, Haleh Redjaian, Hassan Sharif, and Raed Yassin, focusing on our sense of belonging in an ever shifting world. The artworks suggest a sense of displacement in space and time.
“Contemporariness is, then a, singular relationship with one’s time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it.”
Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ (2008)
What is our relationship to space and time? This exhibition frames a sense of our disconnect with space, almost as if we are not living in the present. “Out of Place” illustrates this disjointedness through its depictions of space as illusory, transient, ephemeral, thus casting a feeling of a space which is somehow constructed by its own material cast offs.
Raed Yassin describes his sentiments through a video performance titled ‘Humming in Abandoned Places’, created as a “eulogy for our times.” Showing specific places such as public places – the chapel, the theatre, the stairwell- illustrates the tragedy of what used to be, and the humming of a collective act of expressing tragedy, a gesture of transient healing.
:mentalKLINIK’s work through installations such as “ANOTHER LOVE_2001 (2020)” portrays space as defined by the materiality of constructs. Defined by the subtraction of their own components, the works illustrate feelings of emptiness, misalignment, loss and negativity through depictions of party leftovers, a range of wires sprawled on the wall, and remnants of an evacuated site that still tries to shine.
Vikram Divecha’s “Negative Heaps (of designated waste) (2015)” is an archive of discarded tiles, unused segments of an Islamic geometric patterned mosaic lining, and bits of waste that are hand numbered and arranged in piles creating their own aesthetic pattern. In this way Divecha is trying to portray places as being re-placed. Shifts and ‘replacement’ elements in a meaningless arrangement of items is also depicted in his works, “Spare Parts (2016)”, to insinuate a lack of purpose.
In Divecha’s “Demolition Monoprints (2001)”, walls as spatial parameters of our daily existence are rethought as ephemeral markers of a transient, vanished life. This exhibition makes it clear that a sense of ‘unbelonging’ is as naturally as opposite as our very essence and our very ideals of being in ‘the right time’ or ‘in the right place’.
Through this sense of disillusionment with belonging, this exhibition reflects a new paradigm of change, as we are subtly made to reflect on our sense of being “out of place”.
For more information, please see: https://linkin.bio/galleryivde
