Everything can tumble twice, if it’s confused enough. This world is a confusing place! The Things That Tumble Twice group show, which took over both gallery spaces in London’s Tenderpixel gallery this spring, took the notion of confusion to heart—or rather: paradox. To examine the spheres of duality and multiplicity, the exhibition brought together three international artists: Paris-born Olivier Castel, UK’s Ian Law, and Germany’s Florian Roithmayr.
Using the tension of juxtaposition combined with complementarity and material interrelation (see: bushels of yellow flowers observing a dusty blue sofa), the artists try to express what Gilles Deleuze called “nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy” (presented in the exhibition’s accompanying notes). In this sense, Things That Tumble Twice is not about materiality or immateriality, it is about complexity. “Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference,” Deleuze wrote in the same text (Différence et répétition, 1968), and it is our inability or unwillingness to understand the world purely logistically that the exhibition addresses.
In another accompanying note, Italian novelist Italo Calvino is quoted: “Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn’t pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted.”
It is the dynamic irreducibility of the whole that Things That Tumble Twice grapples with: the space between matter and its absence, between light and darkness, between what is animate and inanimate. “The works in the exhibition change, mutate, perish,” the exhibition says of itself, “they look for each other over space and time, subtly, inhabiting and influencing the perception of the gallery ambients.” Becoming, in the words of Augustine, “something that shows itself to the senses and something other than itself to the mind”.
Exhibition photos, top right.
