Things Entangling

This publication features the works and the research of the twelve artists/groups presented within the exhibition that trace and animate trajectories, nexuses, and mutations of things in resonance with a specific time and place. The artists’ pages have been conceived in discussion with each artist to dig into their practices and processes. When these artists’ practices invoke anthropology, archaeology, or historiography to seek rootedness, they aim less to excavate or clarify the past than to open up new politics of interpretation for building the present. Haunted by different time spans and territories, positions and subjectivities, the artists reveal unexpected intersections, elusive networks, and fleeting affinities between things. Through their works they aspire to open up the closed circles, exclusive territories, and static systems that are around and also within us. The publication starts and finishes with color exhibitions views, laid out as a walk-through; it also includes images taken during the pandemic when the museum was closed to the public. Two texts by Che Kyongfa and Elodie Royer discuss the exhibition from its conception, affected by the pandemic, to its contextual and contemporary implications, emphasizing both points of view and experiences of the show, from where they are based, Paris and Tokyo.