Art Office

smoothing (lines into circles) is an exhibition that aims to break down stark angles, flat obtuseness, vertical systems and myopic assumptions through gestural explorations. The exhibition can be visited from 9 July to 28 August in A Tale of A Tub. Winding around textual and physical abstractions, and meandering along poetic and geometric condensations, the exhibition follows the transformation of straight lines into poetic lines. The works of art simultaneously deal with the materiality of language, the body and form, creating new languages ​​to view, new bodies to read, and new forms of being together.

Artists
The works of Maria Barnas, Sepideh Behruzian, Annabelle Binnerts, Sabrina Chou, Maike Hemmers, José Quintanar, Merey Şenocak, and Baha Görkem Yalım smoothing (lines into circles) are included represent a circle as an unbreakable line of elasticity – an antidote to stiff edges. Using the ambiguity of poetry, the exhibition aims to defeat the rigidity of the idea while at the same time giving poetry a shape and body. The works of art are not simple mono-entities, but composed of multiple parts in collectivity. Each dismembered element serves as an utterance, a letter, a page of a book, a member of a body, a disjointed architectural unit, coming together in a different constellation, a new order, in a strange alphabet. By repeating the same shape to get a new gesture, by repeating the same gesture to create a new shape, by breaking a single entity into pieces, or scattering pieces to make a unity, the works form cycles, circulating in circles.

O
smoothing (lines in circles) is inspired by the curious letter O and its graphic shape. In Turkish, a gender neutral language, this letter is also the pronoun for the third person singular. This queer and post-human O in Turkish (which can be translated simultaneously as he, she, and it) blurs the distinction between male/female, animate/alive, human/inhuman and makes those binary assumptions redundant. Combining this linguistic feature with the formal connotations of a circle, a zero and a hole, O suggests a generative premise to understand the practices of seeing, identifying and pronouncing the other, the third person, the nonspeaker, the strange , to revise the non-conformist. The exhibition brings out ambivalences, gaps and gaps by synchronizing this linguistic ambiguity of the pronoun O with its formal quality. smoothing (lines into circles) offers an alphabet of gestures-in-forms that can be translated into different circumstances in which one has to fight against the politics of the flat land, in search of multiple dimensions.

People are different from each other.
Things are also different from each other.
For example, there are no two identical letters in one alphabet.
Acts are also non-identical. Every gesture is different.

July 9 to August 28, 2022
A Tale of A Tub, Justus van Effenstraat 44