Curatorial Reflections on Louis-Cyprien Rials’ Exhibition ‘The Language of Flowers and Silent Things’ at the Meno Parkas Gallery

Presenting Louis-Cyprien Rials’ work in the space of the Meno Parkas gallery in Kaunas brings out a particular kind of tension between the temporal and the invisible. As a curator, I see his visual language as a means of reconfiguring time through aesthetic form. Rather than contextualising the exhibition through thematic labels, the intention here is to stay close to the works’ own logic, to think with them rather than about them. The following article remains mostly in its original form as an essay or curatorial reflection on why these works resonate so strongly in the present moment, and what it means to be contemporary. I only touch on a few of the works from the exhibition, but the weight of the rest remains the same.

The concept of contemporaneity seems to imply being in the present, a kind of synchronicity with the spirit of the time. However, this notion quickly proves too narrow: the ‘present’ is not a unified category, either historically or philosophically. In Jacques Rancière’s work, we can read that to be contemporary means to be out of sync with one’s time, or more precisely, to disrupt the order of visibility that defines what can be seen, heard and thought.[1] ^[1] Meanwhile, Alain Badiou proposes understanding contemporaneity as fidelity to an event that interrupts the usual flow of a situation and opens up the possibility of truth, not as factual accuracy but as the emergence of a new configuration of the world.[2] ^[2]

Both of these theoretical directions suggest contemporaneity as an active relationship with time, which is neither stable nor neutral. It is the tension between what is spoken and what is silenced. To be contemporary means to enter this tension and to articulate it. This perspective allows contemporary art to be analysed as a site where new relationships emerge with reality, history and the collective imagination.

In Badiou’s theory of art, a position becomes evident that allows us to consider contemporaneity as a relation to what transcends the established order of meaning. Art is identified as one of four truth procedures, along with politics, science and love. In this context, truth is not a form of knowledge or empirical experience. It arises as what disrupts the structure of a situation and introduces a new field of possibility. Badiou inscribes art in this dynamic as a form in which truth becomes possible: ‘Art is itself a truth procedure.’[3] ^[3] Thinking in art occurs autonomously; it need not be unfolded through philosophical systems, for thought functions as an independent structure. Badiou’s formulation emphasises the fact that art generates its own conditions of thought.

The relationship between philosophy and art is defined by the concept of ‘inaesthetics’. This term does not refer to an act of judgment or interpretation, but to a relationship in which philosophy recognises art’s capacity to form truth independently. ‘[…] art, as a singular regime of thought, is irreducible to philosophy.’[4] ^[4] In this context, philosophy does not define art, but acknowledges its event. Contemporaneity emerges in situations where art opens up the possibility of new meaning. A work becomes relevant not through thematic or stylistic context, but through its participation in the production of meaning.

In this context, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory provides additional tools for analysing artistic form as a reorganisation of the structure of sensibility. Rancière does not explicitly define what it means to be contemporary. However, the concepts distinguished in his aesthetic theory allow us to reconstruct an attitude that may be interpreted as contemporary. The main concept is the distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible), which denotes the social structure that determines what is visible, audible, and deemed valuable.[5] ^[5] This is a political distribution that shapes the field of power and representation in society. In this theory, art becomes significant as a form capable of reconfiguring this distribution. The aesthetic regime is characterised by the recognition of art’s autonomy, its ability to operate outside academic or iconographic norms. Rancière emphasises that the political function of art is not instruction or critique, but the potential to create a new structure of sensibility, a different way of thinking.[6] ^[6] To be contemporary, in this case, means to act through the form of art in such a way that a different order of meaning emerges.

The theoretical approaches underlying the concept of contemporaneity require viewing each analysed work as a structure forming a specific relationship with the image. It is important to attend to how the work constructs its own visual logic. This not only allows for the identification of contemporaneity as an aesthetic stance, but also reveals how artistic form gains meaning through interaction with historical, media or political contexts. This perspective becomes particularly relevant when a work develops not from a local tradition but from an established relationship with another culture, a shifting territory, or traumatic experiences.

In Louis-Cyprien Rials’ video Oyuni (2023), the transformation of the gaze becomes apparent, allowing the work to be understood as a site where a relationship emerges with time and the conditions of visual experience, central to contemporaneity. The work is grounded in a 15-year-long relationship between the artist and Iraq, during which a visual archive formed not through documentation but through an active, opening logic. The title of the work, Oyuni, translated as ‘my eyes’ or ‘my love’, already establishes a link between vision and affect, constructed in the work not as a mode of observation, but as the introduction of a cultural relationship.

The structure of the work combines several visual layers: 3D-printed objects in the shape of eyes from Sumerian statues worn by young Iraqis; a musical layer reinterpreting 1960s Iraqi pop music; landscapes captured near the Ziggurat of Ur and the Al-Chibayich marshes; and a performance by the Canadian musician Peter Pringle singing a hymn to Inanna on a reconstructed royal harp. This video material does not seek to unfold a coherent narrative; rather, it is a structure in which aesthetic form becomes a site for articulating a new order of sensibility.

According to Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory, such a mode of operation can be interpreted as a transformation of the distribution of the sensible. In Rials’ work, the mode of viewing is reorganised: what usually remains outside dominant representational practices, young, vibrant Iraqis with proud gazes, becomes the main point of attention. In this way, an alternative order of visibility is created, which, unlike documentary media images, does not offer a canonical iconography of war, violence or oppression. Instead, it establishes an act of seeing that is not representational but generative: it forms a cultural position through the interaction of gaze, object and historical context.

In Alain Badiou’s art theory, such a structure can be identified as an artistic event, a form in which truth emerges by interrupting the prevailing logic of the situation and enabling a new mode of understanding the world. Oyuni does not reproduce familiar visual schemes, but creates the conditions for a new relationship between viewer, history and culture. In this way, the work neither thematises nor declares; it functions as an autonomous condition of thought, what Badiou calls ‘the thinking of art’, which cannot be reduced to another form of knowledge.

The visual language in Rials’ work enables aesthetic operation as a stance towards contemporaneity. It is not just a reconstruction of the cultural heritage or a transmission of tradition in representational form. Oyuni creates a visual structure where the archaeological motif of the gaze (the statues’ eyes), a musical fragment of popular culture, and the glances of the younger generation, play as visual elements in which identity takes on an active form.

Louis-Cyprien Rials’ Afghan War Rugs, woven in Kabul, continue a tradition that began in the late 1970s. At that time, Afghan communities found themselves in an unending cycle of conflict, and during the war residents had to find new ways to survive. One way was to weave small military rugs that were sold as souvenirs to occupying soldiers. Initially, the rugs depicted Soviet tanks, Kalashnikovs, helicopters, and sometimes maps of Afghanistan. Later, after 9/11, when the Americans arrived, they began to depict US weapons, the Twin Towers, drones, and images of terror. These rugs are directly linked to the current reality, which left a profound impact on the artist.

Alongside the critical transformation of perspective, Louis-Cyprien Rials’ works raise questions about the distribution of visual positions in the global economy of visibility. The war rugs woven in Afghanistan, which may appear exotic or aesthetically intriguing to Western eyes, arise from a field of experience where violence and occupation operate as a lived regime. This disproportion between the viewer’s position and the work’s genesis makes it possible to speak about the political division of visibility.

On the other hand, the very technique of rug-making, its material character and its slow rhythm of creation are significant as a structural counterpoint to the digital image stream dominating war imagery. Rials’ rugs offer an alternative temporal logic: the weaving process is an act that destabilises the circulation of war aesthetics. It is precisely through this structure of labour that a new experience of time becomes possible, one that is not synchronised with the acceleration of informational warfare.

Rials’ works register interruptions, in which the visual material resists its representational closure. The repetitive structures of rug weaving, like the artificiality of the gaze in Oyuni, maintain a tension between formal order and semantic drift. This tension, not as an effect, but as a condition of production, allows us to consider contemporaneity through a shift in the logic of vision. It is form that interrupts the established logic of perception and enables the emergence of a different distribution of seeing.

[1] ^[7] Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004, p. 22.

[2] ^[8] Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 9.

[3] ^[9] Ibid., p. 1.

[4] ^[10] Ibid., p. 9.

[5] ^[11] Op. cit.  Jacques. p. 12.

[6] ^[12] Ibid., p. 12.