Ceylan Öztrük’s solo show Matter of non, on view from October 3, 2021, until January 29, 2022, at Friart Kunsthalle, is an exhibition unraveling at the threshold of nothingness, understood as a generative field of possibilities. Or it is a material speculation on the relationship between sculpture and writing, marble and its carving, matter and its removal, art making and death, as well as a philosophical quest on the limits of human thinking and knowing, performed at the edge of the clouds of unknowing.

The project The Devil of Affinities consists of a theoretical text, a poetic text and an imagined exhibition. The exhibition was scheduled to open May 15th, 2020 at the project space Gern en Regalia in New York and includes the artists Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho and Cole Lu. Due to COVID-19, it has been postponed for an uncertain amount of time. Unable to facilitate the exhibition as planned, I have reimagined the project for Brand-New-Life to forefront what has emerged from my study of these artists and their works in ensemble.

On November 27, 2019 Geneva-based Off Space Cherish and Brand-New-Life organized a reading with Fatima Wegmann. The two contributions, titled Above the Abyss and Contradiction is Unity published here originated from this reading and are published on B-N-L as video- and text-based documentation and an accompanying essay. In her performance Fatima Wegmann explores science fiction and theory - which she sees as closely interrelated - through an audio-visual practice. This allows her to investigate a space of experimentation in search of emancipatory discourse - narratives off-center from patriarchal and imperialist thought. As part of an expansion of the discussion towards French-speaking Switzerland, B-N-L offers a platform to text-based artistic practice. Writing is an artistic practice that is still not comprehensively remunerated and recognized and, in the art context, is too rarely a subject of funding programmes. B-N-L therefore gives artists a framework to develop a new text.

Walking into Laure Prouvost’s exhibition I nearly missed a note she had dropped. She had written it for the moment I moved through the liminal glass passage where you can see galleries in front and behind, yet below lies the water of Lake Lucerne. It read «…look iam waving but maybe you cant see me I can see you, you look great today…» in sloping cursive, though nobody down there seemed to be looking up.