Artists

Harminder Judge, Rana Begum, Monty Richthofen, James Prapaithong, Richard Serra, Chryssa, Lukas Heerich, Emanuel de Carvalho, Magdalena Skupinska, Rudolf Széchenyi

Press release

“Can the study of fleeting images be a subject?”

This question is posed by Gaston Bachelard, philosopher of science and cataloger of the different ways the elements – earth, water, fire, air – fertilize our imaginations and implant themselves in our dreams. Blue skies, wings, rising clouds, wind and nebulae: these, for Bachelard, constitute the “aerial imagination,” his category of poetic images that deal with air as their guiding element. The materials that make up this category do not lend themselves to figuration – air, wind, and light are hard to fix into a frame. Part of the problem, as Bachelard observes, is that these substances are defined by their mobility, always on the verge of being tipped into a different state. “Images of aerial imagination either evaporate or crystallize,” he writes.

The works in this exhibition, in widely varying ways, propose answers to our opening question. Rana Begum’s Mesh appears to be suspended between evaporating and crystallizing, as a cloud of galvanized steel hangs in the air, seemingly weightless. In her Louvre works, painted glass panes echo the movement of light across a window, filtered through translucent blinds. Here, industrial materials are made to contain the residue of fleeting effects: in Begum’s works, these effects are atmospheric; in Lukas Heerich’s Glocke, sonic. An absence of sound hovers around the fallen bell’s form, as what should be a resonating body soaring through air is muted by rubber – heavy, insulating, absorbent.