“Contemporary Intersects” explores different strata comprising our contemporary reality, or rather, questions the possible intersections between different ensembles, different spaces.

The starting point of the project is Gordon Matta-Clark’s monumental work “Office Baroque”, an intervention through the architecture of a building, of which only photographic and filmic traces remain today, which, while resonating with the Loods 6 building and its spaces, operates a radical transgression of our perception.

How can we speak of transgression, of transgressing, when it’s not a question of moral transgression? Rather, it’s a matter of crossing, or overflowing, what is posited as a boundary for our senses, for hearing and sight. It’s also, just as much, and perhaps more precisely, about fracturing. Of what fracturing – of what is not supposed to break – lets us hear or see.

Gordon Matta-Clarck‘s work literally cuts through a building, like an architect-sculptor, stripped of all the materiality that accompanies sculpture. The building is hollowed out, emptied, pierced along contours that seem at once governed by the most rigorous geometry, but also by the appearance of the most perfect arbitrariness, so that only a general view makes it possible to understand its purpose.

It’s a reversal of the act of seeing. Matta-Clarck acts; the work is the action. The film shows us an action whose result is no longer visible. The building has been destroyed.

As in “Conical Intersect” (1975), it is the act of seeing that transgresses, crosses and transforms the materiality of a building, reconnecting different spaces and scales. The act of seeing reveals something incomprehensible, if not monstrous, about our existence in the world: how is it possible for the unassignable interiority of an individual and the world that unfolds in complete exteriority to come together? Through our gaze, which reverses not only inside and outside, but also intimate private time and shared public time.

In “Office Baroque”, the gaze traverses’ space in unusual ways, ways that were previously impossible in the usual use of space. In this way, Matta-Clark transgresses the logic of the senses, exposing the monstrosity of the act of seeing, which brings together the invisible of the most intimate gaze with the exteriority of the world and its constructed spaces.

By projecting the shadow of vast foliage onto the ground, “Invisible Presence” literally opens up the space, abolishing the walls of the exhibition space. With Theis Wendt‘s installation, the transgression or reversal here is not that of up and down, but rather that of depth and surface.

What is evoked is not so much the shadow of foliage, but the trees and light that produce it, just as the thing precedes the word, presence exceeds representation. The installation creates a monumental off-screen space, on the scale of the world. The gap between the evoked presence and what is visible evokes a world of strange tones, a world buried or past, imbued with a strange nostalgia. With the slow quivering of leaf shadows, the entire surface of the world vibrates.

We’re in that part of the world: a world beyond our contemporary times, after our society has collapsed, there’s only invisible trees and sun, perceptible only through shadows.

Yet there is no hidden truth in the depths of the sky. In line with Deleuze’s reflection in “The Logic of Sense” that the search for the meaning of something ceases to be a search for its “deeper meaning”, hidden beneath visible appearances, here, through these projections, all depth is brought to the surface; there is no depth or invisibility outside what is present on the surface.

With his installation “Topia”, Zalán Szakács questions these notions by confronting us with the vision of immaterial screens interwoven through space, made perceptible by light and haze. What he questions are the very notions of surface and projection. The surfaces of the screens are themselves dissolved, no longer a material support stopping the light and allowing us to perceive projected images, they become images themselves and are the very finality of what is to be perceived, without opacity, constituted by light, now imbricated in the depth of space. The screens become thresholds, fractures of light, opening onto suspended spaces where perception wavers.

In “Under Boom”, Louis Braddock Clarke makes the fracturing of the world audible. His installation plunges us into the deep murmurs of the Earth, where the inaudible becomes vibration and time, resonance. From an island in the middle of the Atlantic, the distant sounds of the planet, captured and recorded as infrasound – air strikes, calving of ice sheets, seismic guns, etc. – are amplified and become the sonic signs of the disturbances and crises of our time. Sound becomes a trace inscribed in our disrupted ecosystems. The installation acts as a listening station, a sensitive point where the deep vibrations of the world and the traces of our history intertwine, thus opening up the possibility of a different kind of listening and a different experience of the world.

Each of the four works in the exhibition represents a transgression or reversal of our way of perceiving and understanding the world. Each work designates different spaces, crosses and transforms them, and, at their intersection, questions the possibility of a common world.

These four works connect us to the urgent and necessary nature of a common perception, at the intersection of the multiple contemporary spaces we cross.