Swiss artist Fabian Marti presented his first solo show at Pougues-les-Eaux’s Parc Saint Léger gallery in France, that ran from July 26 to August 30. Originally set up as a dark room and residency space, the exhibition now turns to the installation and display of the photograms produced on site by the artist. The conflation of an accelerationist politics in its aesthetic form produces interesting results.

The work is undoubtedly visually striking – a light-filled room clustered with oval shaped images of various colours resting on the floor and hanging from the walls, somewhat reminiscent of zygotes. Geometry is clearly at the heart of Marti’s work and his relationship to the gallery. These circular creations sit among the harder angles, exposed beams and brickwork, the various shapes and lines created by the space itself.

The prominence of the oval/egg/zygote shape seem to point to  beginnings; of movement and of the life cycle itself. An octopus emerging from some sort of primordial ooze heightens both the sense of a singular beginning and an alien feeling. A sense of perpetual motion can also be gleaned in the exhibition. Both directly with the spinning of a clay wheel on video or more subtly with the circular, repeated imprints in some of the oval shapes. The singular human  framed by an egg shows the  figure seemingly running on the beach – perhaps unifying the imagery of childhood with the flux of the exhibition. Hanging tentacles bring together a child’s mobile with a wind chime while still clay pots are constructed in such a way to appear to be moving.

Both the relationship to geography  (angles, vectors, speed), as well as the egg and zygote form is also possible to glean an accelerationist examination. Motion and beginnings. But also potential endings: Is the advancement and development of new technology, of new inequalities and ecological disasters leading us towards a new zero point, an end of capitalism, a new embyonic phase?

As the press release suggests, “Marti can be viewed as a genuine skeptic … it [is] a form of research that also leads him to question a movement or rather a constellation of thoughts that sees in the acceleration of technologies and progress a way of changing the world, not through transformation or revolution, but rather implosion.” J’ai dit : tais-toi accélérationniste ! also seems to bring to stark relief the role of human agency in such a process: What work is to be done – for the artist, for anyone –  to construct new material realities? **