Artists

Yoeri Guépin, Hichem Merouche

Press release

Metaphysical Thresholds brings together the work of two artists who, despite having different backgrounds, both look towards their respective grandmothers' legacies, beginning with the plants both women nurtured. Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens, this exhibition takes a critical perspective on the ecological turn in the arts with artwork that figures forth long-standing and geographically divergent practices of gardening as an established metaphysical practice. Yoeri Guépin and Hichem Merouche present a video work, a scent-based installation, and community interventions that recenter the esoteric dimension of the natural world and plant-life in politically engaged artistic practices. In this exhibition, plants have multidirectional agency, meaning that while the actual living things Guépin and Merouche work with are rooted in the ground in a physical sense, the plants encountered in both installations also stand symbolically at the threshold of human encounters with death, spirituality, intergenerational transmission and eco-social crisis. For Guépin and Merouche, human transformation consists of decay and regeneration: core processes that parallel natural cycles. Guépin's biodynamic cosmology and Merouche's reflection on burial practices create a poetic and critical encounter across nationalisms and faiths. Guépin's video installation, "As Above So Below", evolves from his long-term engagement with the biodynamic agricultural practices of his grandmother, Wilfriede Driehuyzen Guépin, a pioneer of organic farming in the Netherlands. Through her handwritten notes, oral histories, and filmed conversations, the artist reconstructs a marginalized worldview that recognizes the agency of plants and the cosmic dimension of farming. The idiom "as above, so below" anchors the project in Hermetic and alchemical traditions, in which earthly processes mirror celestial ones. Merouche presents an installation commissioned by Llorens and developed over two years of dialogue entitled "rīḥa" – ريحة. In colloquial Algerian Arabic, rīḥa holds two meanings, scent and memory. The work's central element is essence of the Pelargonium Graveolens distilled using techniques local to Merouche's hometown Annaba and disseminated in the gallery of Konsthall C. The scent invisibly carries the weight of the Merouche family history of dispersal across Algeria and abroad, and the forces that sustain kinship.