Potential

Group Exhibition

As a common expression meaning a covert ability or feasibility, the concept of “potential,” has become a semantic phenomenon that embodies a means of judgment and at the same time a seemingly impartial tool for prediction. Whether it concerns an individual, who during their studies receives the evaluation “potential” as a compassionate grade for unrealized ability, or whether as a matter of raw physical or mental manifestation—at the core is the gulf between moving from a latent power to action.

The exhibition at the Edmond de Rothschild Center seeks to address the question of potential in its appearance on the one hand as a dormant force awaiting a catalyst for it to be realized, and on the other as a static element that transforms the feasible into manifestation proper, hence ending, the possible, potential, for change.

Like situations that hide within them the seeds of fruition, and still more variations that may be tested during the process, so the term “potential” holds a rich and layered thematic range of reference points. Within the array of possibilities and in the face of our engagement with a space that is primarily visual, one of the fundamental themes underlying the exhibition is engagement with the formulation and at the same time the feasibility of modes of viewing the objects on display. The protocol of viewing in customary art spaces is often done within the policing convention of space/gaze/movement. The accepted designation of an exhibition space that attempts to negate the fact of its existence and simultaneously the seeping into it of the outside/reality, often seems like a means that feeds on external (usually economic) dictates for its operating instructions. These have the power to define in detail the viewer/artwork relationship, including: the appropriate distance for viewing, intensity of lighting and temperature, duration of the stay, the route through the exhibit, and other prohibitions and instructions for the supposedly optimal viewing of the works.

How, if at all, might freeing a space from its conventional “utilitarian function” and changing one use for another enable the creation of a new protocol? Visitors to the exhibition at the Edmond de Rothschild Center will be asked to view it through the building’s doorways; the doors of the center will remain closed for the duration of the exhibition and viewing will be possible 24/7 only through the windows and glass doors. The question of the potential embodied in the gaze hence becomes no less interesting than when it is directed towards the actual works of art.

The six artists participating in the exhibition were asked to address the issue of potential in general and the feasibility of the gaze in particular in their attempt to formulate a space that would blur and disrupt structured and inherited conventions of movement, viewing, and listening.