Curator’s introduction

The group exhibition Exit Elephantine poses the question: how does a boundary in one person’s life become a line in another person’s drawing? The works in the show reinterpret the narratives of individuals and communities, exploring how they ended up behind a specific physical, psychological, political or social border – whether by choice, accident or force. The works not only tell the stories of change that happened to others, but also, in their plastic form, embody the very promise of change.

Not all of the works in the exhibition are works of art – some are fragments of larger pieces, remnants of the production process, preparatory material or rumours. They don’t offer any coherent story or visual unity, let alone a clear message. On the contrary, their eclectic, polyphonic coexistence suggests fragile space, whose flimsy coordinates are marked by the losses and errors of meaning that occur in the process of translation from narrative to material, from the personal to the collective. Here, escapist poetics goes head-to-head against mainstream politics of escapism.

In the exhibition title, the Ultima Thule of the ancient world, the island of Elephantine, takes on the role of a clumsy, heavyweight character in a well-known English metaphor representing an evidently ignored problem. Neither imperative for action nor a thing, Exit Elephantine is more of an error mode of semantic production for intimacy and ultimate distance to intersect.