The title of the exhibition within the horizon of the object is borrowed from a comprehensive 1999 show of the photographic work of Jean Baudrillard. The French theorist's obsession with things and their absence, reality and its disappearance into illusion, set the stage for much of the appropriation art of the 1980s, which is today acknowledged as one celebrated mode in contemporary artistic practice.
within the horizon of the object brings together five very different artistic positions, within which the various artists not only confront themselves with the object, found or self-made, but explore the formal language and the suggestive quality that an object projects within its requisite space. Thus the participating artists apply new rules to an object in relation to its surroundings. The title of the exhibition also mirrors this transition: the distortion and attempt to redefine the object after the space it occupies. Or is it vice versa? This question begs to be studied through the looking glass of scenography, architecture and theory. The five artists each uniquely examine the role of the spectator, the object and the reading of the object. They proceed with a sensibility that always questions the overall concept of room and space without necessarily putting them at the center of our attention.
For the exhibition, Emilie Ding (CH), Viktor Korol (CH), Virginia Overton (US), Mandla Reuter (DE) and Adam Thompson (GB) were specifically asked to interact with the space of the Ausstellungsraum Klingental. They might make use of elements in the building or its surroundings, they may create architectural interventions or minor shifts in structures or focus on an altogether different aspect that lays beyond the local context. The public is invited to observe five disparate working methods, though they all share and exploit a greater notion and common area of felt space while applying a diverse set of tactics of presentation. Of humorist, romantic, pragmatic or symbolic nature, the works' site-specificity provoke the spectator's consciousness and beg our minds to see beyond the objects’ functionality, materiality and potential. They create new narratives and thus translate into a fresh set of symbolic and referential qualities inherent to the work.