Thresholds, Doors, Portals…

From Thu. 17 Apr. 2025

To Sat. 5 Jul. 2025

Inspired by Mark Fisher’s writings in The Weird and the Eerie in which presences and absences disturb by exposing the contingency of what we take as natural, the exhibition unveils a reality that is not fixed but open to forces from the outside.

Curated by Ariane Sutthavong.

Image: Violeta Mayoral
Untitled XXV (Alguna Direccion series) 2024

Ground Floor

Crafted with surgical precision, Lionel Dury’s Nuage Atomique evokes the turbulence of natural forces that defy borders and containment. His embroidered forms emerge not through addition but through removal, resisting legibility and subverting the map as an instrument of power. While echoing the colonial practice of carving up territories, this act also proposes a quiet reparation—an attempt to undo divisions.

Meanwhile, the buoy—a marker of borders and surveillance—is reimagined by TingJung Chen in Envelope (392 Hz), layered with fragments of political newspapers, speaking to the tenuous, shifting nature of geopolitical conflicts and the slow erosion of fixed truths. What once signalled control now wavers in meaning.

Esther Ferrer’s Monochrome from the series “Dans le cadre de l’art…” overturns the rigidity of frames and perspectives, while the elliptical nature of an airplane journey—marked by James Scott Brooks only by hollow traces of departure and destination in his Aether Airports—is confronted with works that highlight more precarious experiences of migration.

Rooted in his personal experience of displacement and the linguistic dissonance that comes with moving across borders, Babi Badalov’s visual poetry disassembles normative systems of meaning. The famous Martin Luther King phrase, “I have a dream”, is twisted into “I have a scream”—not as mere wordplay, but as an act of resistance against the assimilation of radical ideals into comfortable slogans.

Angyvir Padilla’s immersive installation Domestic Ghosts reflects a space in flux—a house where architectural logic has become fractured under the weight of time and necessity. Here, you don’t move through rooms—you trespass, drift, hesitate. Born from a residency in one of Caracas’ colonial neighbourhoods, her conversation with a friend blind to this part of the city is a call and response between the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the speculative.

Presence and absence are further explored in perdre. Valère de Meeûs invites visitors into an unstable archive, unsettling the promise of permanence. Participants are asked to record a memory of the last time they were lost—but to do so, they must erase the previous memory. Their voices linger in the fragile space of passage, where stories surface only to vanish.

Les traits fortuits by Marc Buchy challenges the smoothness and efficiency inherent to communication supports and their role in facilitating exchange and consumption. By asking both the curator and the audience to write using their non-dominant hand, Buchy introduces a moment of vulnerability, resulting in imperfect and playful traces of human presence.

First Floor

Elena Bajo collects debris from the L.A. River—discarded fragments Untitled In destined for oblivion. The plastic, designed to outlast human use, is encased in concrete, underlining the tension between waste and monument. Bajo elevates the everyday, challenging conventional hierarchies of value and questioning what we choose to preserve or discard.

In a vain attempt to freeze time and decay, Nadia Guerroui’s flowers in industrial, vacuum-sealed plastic bags. Flimsy and ephemeral in nature, the flowers’ decomposition is slowed to an unnaturally prolonged pace in the absence of air. Evoking a contemporary still life, Guerroui invites reflection on the desire to
control time and nature. Violeta Mayoral captures an undefined moment—hovering between day and night,
Untitled XXV (Alguna gravity and levity, presence and disappearance. The photograph dwells on the edge of reality, where perception falters. Direccion series)
For Manifesta in St. Petersburg, Francis Alÿs restaged a personal, unfulfilled memory: a failed teenage road trip from Brussels to Moscow with his brother in a Lada 1500. The original journey was cut short when the car broke down. Alÿs delves into the absurdity of nostalgia and the urge to relive the past—not to freeze time, but to rewind it. The drive, repeated in a 1977 Lada Kopeika, ends with a crash into a tree in the courtyard of the Winter Palace, symbolising the shattering of youthful illusions. is a piece of spectrolite known for its shifting, multicoloured shine. Declined Invitation Trevor Yeung has partially polished its surface, coaxing out a glimmer reminiscent of
the northern lights. The gesture stems from an invitation to travel together which was declined, and the journey never took place. Yeung projects the imagined experience onto the stone, allowing care and longing to crystallise in its surface. The object becomes a proxy for intimacy deferred, for affection displaced, for a shared moment that never came to be.

Claire Andrzejczak, in Duration, grasps at suspended seconds in a family photograph Duration Claire Andrzejczak, in when individuals teeter between movement and stillness, between performance and
authenticity. These polaroid images were preserved in a sheet of paper, then tucked away among her everyday belongings. Forgotten, then occasionally rediscovered, the paper was folded and unfolded over time. Marked by use, its creases resemble a landscape, a trace of time and touch.

In Switching Off Stonehenge and in Turning On Stonehenge, Jamie Reid and Martin Sexton revisit a 1913 ceremony in which Stonehenge was symbolically “switched off”. Like the digital advice to “turn it off and on again,” this gesture proposes a reset—not of devices but of collective consciousness and cultural memory.