ALL SOULS

What did I

do?

Seminated the night, as though there could be others, more nocturnal than

this one. Bird flight, stone flight, a thousand described routes. Glances, purloined and plucked. The sea, tasted, drunk away, dreamed away. An hour soul-eclipsed. The next, an autumn light,

offered up to a blind feeling which came that way. Others, many, with no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and

avoided.

Foundlings, stars, black, full of language: named

after an oath which silence annulled. And once (when? that too is forgotten):

felt the barb

where my pulse dared the counter-beat.

Paul Celan, 1971

In his current installation to summarize the residency at Wiels Brussels 2023, Andro Eradze returns to photography and installation, the medium he entered his practice with and the language he has developed over the course of his career. This time, Eradze leaves out film, light, affect and focuses on stillness of bodies and an image as still, rather than moving.

In the cold and grey weather of Brussels, the installation feels and looks colder and greyer. The iron fences dividing the space into multiplicities work as stems for photographs in iron frames, reminding us of abandoned gardens, cemeteries and other prohibitions.

The slick and distant fences are adorned with abstract details of what might be details of a human or other mammals’ flesh. These details carry similar texture as the fences and it is difficult to distinguish them. Body Without Organs, I think to myself. Rather organs without a body, or is the fence here the body for the organs? No matter the reading, the installation does provoke questions around de-territorialized body, socius and other systems. The emptiness that the fences guard is un-productive at the first glance, but the intensity of the color blue, as if from lightboxes, coming out from the photographs which the fences “produce”, breaks the silence and a certain law of the ideas behind the well-known thoughts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The exhibition is part of Eradze’s ongoing research into the subjects which has created a leitmotif in his practice in the recent years. The questions around wilderness, otherness and othering create the core matter to unwrap, while heavily descending on the invasive defense structures at stake. “Others, many, with no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and avoided”- reads the Paul Celan poem the exhibition draws its title from, leaving us with questions around centers and all that is left aside.