“The Place of Ready” is Gathering’s inaugural exhibition at ECHO Cologne that includes Özgür Kar, Louis Morlæ and Tai Shani.

The works inside “The Place of Ready” take archetypal imagery related to the state of suspension between life and dying as their level of departure. Every artist finds moments of poignancy and reinvention within the coagaulation of myths surrounding immortality, or the interstices the place soul and physique diverge.

Tai Shani’s follow is marked by an curiosity in arcane histories and rituals; via her sculpture, she reimagines their attendant artefacts and proposes new ones for his or her speculative reinvention. She attracts especial inspiration from the documentation of intact ceremonial burial chambers: websites the place our bodies grow to be matter and the degraded materials of clothes, hair and pores and skin mingles with the permanency of stone, jewelry, bone and enamel. A Hundred Thousand Ghosts II, 2023 invokes this alchemical combination of objects and matter within the burial website: encased in a glass casket, an object resembling an elongated backbone is adorned with golden talismans and electrical flowers that illuminate and dim on the tempo of breath. The vitrine-like casket evokes preservation: a life each attenuated and sustained, metamorphosed into one thing not fairly alive however not but lifeless.

Louis Morlæ has taken this in-between state as the topic of his latest physique of labor, drawing upon portrayals of the inhabitants of Purgatory in late Gothic and early Renaissance artwork. His sculptures are suspended be- tween life and dying – between machine and organism. Just like the souls within the apocalyptic visions of Brueghel the Elder and Bosch, Morlæ’s robotic creatures possess an air of expectancy, as if ready for his or her transition into one state or the opposite to be full. With drooping eyes and plush our bodies, the marked vulnerability of the figures’ physicality belies their final potential for immortality, as automated machines proof against bodily decay.

Özgür Kar’s animations are equally positioned in a state of suspension. Locked contained in the bounds of their screens, the characters seem caught in two-dimensional compression, transferring and talking while mired in stasis. In his 2021 Storage Drama collection, ‘Dying’ is personified as a solil- oquising, musical instrument-playing skeleton, trapped inside tv units mounted inside flight instances. These skeleton figures play upon the Medieval trope of the Danse Macabre – an allegorical formulation of dying as a vaudeville parade of the dwelling, being guided to their demise by grinning cadavers. In Kar’s work, Dying seems virtually out of date, relegated to a state of round, disjointed efficiency – a fragmented set-piece from an imaginary absurdist play.

—Sybilla Griffin

by Gathering at ECHO, Cologne
till October 31, 2024