A Hundred Ways to Disappear

Alfredo Aceto, Pierre Allain, Janis Avotins, Olga Balema, Martin Boyce, stanley brouwn, Tatjana Danneberg, Latifa Echakhch, Matthias Groebel, Stefana McClure, Paulo Nazareth, Matthias Odin, Berenice Olmedo, Michel Parmentier, Jeronimo Ruedi, Nora Turato

As a counterpoint to the imperative of the self, its development and its visibility, another temptation has emerged in the realms of thought, art, and literature: that of being less, of disappearing. A movement that would stand as a critical resistance to the current injunctions to performance, hyper-visibility and self-construction: substituting the fragmentary for the affirmation of a form and a subject creates a space for reflection. To disappear does not mean leaving nothing behind, but rather to re-evaluate what remains after the withdrawal.

Intermittent appearance, erasure, removal, or di­ s a­ p pearance are all circumventing strategies that the works brought together for this exhibition engage with. Between presence and absence, what endures and what fades, the imprint and the void, avoidance emerges as an alternative to the escalation of the visible.

“To look at what you wouldn’t look at, to hear what

you wouldn’t listen to, to be attentive to the banal,

to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary”

—Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics Of Disappearance, ed. translated by Philip Beitchman, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2009 (p. 47)