The text accompanying the works of this exhibition would only truly fulfil its purpose if it were to evaporate into thin air at the moment of reading it. The consistency of the words somewhat clashes with the ephemerality of the works, for example with choicest relict by Anna-Sophie Berger, which showcases the now-dried traces of wet, hand-sewn overalls on pattern paper. The work’s title references a paragraph in Henry David Thoreaus’ 1854 classic ‘Walden, or, Life in the Woods’, in which he talks about the preciousness of words, which he describes as the most intimate yet universal form of art. The artist translates this sameness of opposites, intimacy and universality, into a trace, which is both an intimate touch and unspecific shape. She creates a fleeting yet preserved moment, a relic of the past. 

But it is the search for an intensification of the past moment rather than the attempt to capture eternity that connects the works of this exhibition. Apart from the direct trace, as well as the wrinkles of the wetted paper, photography is an important aid in conveying this. It captures a single moment and whilst also indicating the ‘relentless passing of time’[1]. Mikko Rikkala documented the vanishing of a ring left by a water glass (Evaporation of a Circle, 2017), in four photographs taken 15 minutes apart respectively. He created a fusion of trace and photography, visualising the temporality of the medium through the medium itself. 

Ryan Gander attempted to draw a candle at the precise moment of its flame extinguishing. As if obsessed with the hopelessness of his attempt, he created 365 calligraphies titled Embrace your mistakes…your mistakes are the markers of your time (2019) within the space of a year, which he crumpled, threw away and retrieved time and again. The disturbing experience of the fleeting moment’s incomprehensibility becomes painfully apparent through the frequent repetition and the shapeless material of the drawing ink. The motif of the extinguished candle originates in Christian Vanitas-iconography. Together with skulls, withered flowers and hourglasses, it constitutes a symbol of the transience of all things terrestrial and their voidness compared to the eternity of afterlife. 

The ephemerality represented in these works, however, exceeds a morbid fascination with the past moment. It is a confrontation with the processes of the sensual, real world. With her work Brief Syllale (Combustible) (2016), part of an underground high voltage cable found in Berlin city cast in acrylic, Nina Canell isolated the blazing fast, globalised flow of electricity and information from the present, creating a sculptural snapshot. The object, cut off from the flow of data, questions the infrastructure of communication technologies being used as a mechanism of digitalised capitalism. But all works of this exhibition, not only the severed cable, showcase destabilisation and destruction (wet paper, an overflowing glass, blurry ink, an empty plastic bag, etc.) alongside their treatment of the past, and thus recognisably point towards the lability of the world. They initiate a dialogue between the fractures and continuity of the Here and Now. 

Text: Pia-Marie Remmers

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[1] Susan Sonntag, ‘About photography‘, 1980