IN PASSING

What remains when something changes? What happens to things, bodies and landscapes when their familiar form or meaning begins to shift?

IN PASSING turns its attention to states of transition and to the fragility of structures that have long appeared self-evident and enduring. The exhibition explores change and transience, asking how meaning, materiality and perception shift when what is familiar loses its stability.

The works of Wil-ma Kammerer and Zingerle Andreas meet within a field of tension between permanence and transience, holding on and disappearance. Kammerer’s works address the vulnerability of nature and landscape in a present in which ecological and social balances appear increasingly unstable. The melting of glaciers and the loss of landscape become signs of a present in which permanence and stability are becoming precarious. The cloud, too, as an image of longing, infinite expansiveness and lightness, undergoes a shift in meaning, becoming at the same time a trace of violence, explosion and destruction. The works thus move between beauty and loss, nature and human intervention. Materials such as stone, glass, mirrors and light become carriers of contradictory states: they can suggest permanence while simultaneously making decay visible.

In Zingerle Andreas’s works, too, opposing states encounter one another: the weight and permanence of concrete meet the fleeting nature of painting; bodies encounter technology, while material value meets socially attributed value. Objects intended for consumption and immediate use are cast in concrete, acquiring a new and lasting presence; casts of bodies exist somewhere between the human body, the object and technological extension. In the paintings, by contrast, the visible becomes increasingly fragile: luminous depictions of insects allow contours and colours to almost disappear. The question of value becomes particularly evident in the concrete bars, which take on the form and weight of a gold bar while being made of concrete. The focus thus shifts towards the question of what makes an object valuable – its material, its function, or the meaning attributed to it by society.

IN PASSING invites us to look more closely: at what changes, at notions of value that are by no means self-evident, and at an environment whose stability is increasingly becoming a social concern. The exhibition directs attention towards the in-between, towards what eludes our immediate grasp, changes its form and meaning, and becomes visible precisely in the moment of its disappearance.