The prime trigger for this exhibition is the direct experience of what is not spoken or described. Non-language based ideas and ways of alternative exchange have been explored and experimented with by a number of artists and thinkers at different points in time and space. While language and concepts are vastly privileged in how contemporary art is made and mediated, there has always remained a possibility for another kind of encounter.
Departing from the limits of the verbal, Words aren’t the thing is based on the instinctive, the material, the visual and the personal. It manifests itself as one layered body – a mirage-like landscape, similar to a staged set or a hunter’s decoy, which tricks the eye into moving closer and offers a glimpse inside what remains at distance. The works in the exhibition are materiality and experience combined, oscillating between irony and integrity, veiling and grotesque, acting and lucky accidents. They invite the viewer to meet half way whilst remaining rooted in the world of things – approachable through relationships that, luckily perhaps, we have no language for.
On Friday 13 November at 6 pm the artist group D.O.R. is commissioned to inaugurate the exhibition and give an in-depth analysis on the conceptual gravitation points of the de-lingualised situation that inhabits the space between the word and the thing, and how this brutally dis-communicates thought.
The opening night concludes with a DJ set-performance from artist Hannah Heilmann.
Curators: Ūla Tornau and Asta Vaičiulytė
Artists: Øyvind Aspen, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, D.O.R., Kipras Dubauskas, Lili Dujourie, Laurent Dupont, Mai Hofstad Gunnes, Hannah Heilmann, Anders Holen, E.B. Itso, Kalin Lindena, Maria Loboda, Valérie Mannaerts, NUG, Michael Van den Abeele
