A group exhibition with works by Rehaf Al Batniji, Sven Augustijnen, Nidhal Chamekh, Banele Khoza, Naeem Mohaiemen, Peter Piller and Oraib Toukan.
As screens flood our daily lives with countless images, where to turn our gaze? Sometimes, the urge to log on simply proves too strong; at other times, the need to avert our gaze wins out, as if online encounters could threaten our happiness. This reflects the swing of our daily feed of images, oscillating between stupor and cat memes.
PAUSE is an exhibition that plays with our ambivalent attraction towards the flow of images we encounter daily. The artists gathered here question the empathy that links us to these images — as well as the contexts that manufacture them.
Motifs that have slipped into oblivion, whether because of a need to survive, uprootedness, embarrassment, or contempt emerge throughout the exhibition like ghosts haunting the present. They punctuate our visual wanderings, charged with meanings that might not fully appear to us — but which still determine the visual environments we inhabit. Collapsing present and past, they resonate with specific art historical forms, ranging from historical painting (scenes of debate, war or violence) to genre painting (still lifes, landscapes).
Walter Benjamin wrote of recollection: ‘For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’ This sentence underlines the extent to which attachment to the past shapes the present. Currently, any loss of the past is often framed as something to be avoided at all costs. This desire for preservation also affects us on an individual level; we regularly upload or backup our experiences on external media. This is nonetheless hardly a unidirectional process since it also entails the offloading of our own memory. As the construction of memory undergoes a radical shift, our relationship to images and the visual arts is also transformed.
The different image-types brought together by the exhibition are a reminder that art history always reflects structures of domination. How then, to put the power inherited by the museum to good use? How to displace motifs usually linked to history’s victors in favour of other genealogies? The exhibition’s juxtaposition of images linked to historical events with seemingly anecdotal ones underlines how every image stems from a political context; as a tool of communication, every image conveys and embodies specific values and perspectives. Differentiating between a potentially cumbersome nostalgia and a thoughtful scrutiny of the past, the exhibition hopes to revisit the past in order to propose new ways of looking at the present — and vice-versa.
Curated by Fanny Gonella, in discussion with Sophie Potelon
Press release from Frac Lorraine
Image: Naeem Mohaiemen. Two Meetings and a Funeral. 2017. Exhibition view of Pause 49, Nord 6 Est–Frac Lorraine, Metz 6 September 2024–9 February 2025. Photography by Fred Dott. Image courtesy of the artist
