04 October - 18 November 2017

For the London gallery show “Revolution Orbita”, Alicja Kwade has chosen to present OrbitaGravitas, a site-specific installation, where the stainless steel loops and weighted
floating boulders place the space in tension. The gallery metaphorically becomes the centre of the universe, with planets circling through it.
Under this site-specific installation stands another sculpture in place of the same construction, CausalStability, as a counterpart to the gravitational dial. It creates a bond
between the shows at the Fair and the gallery. A trillionth of a second also sets out a gravitational wave pattern made of compass needles. The two systems of measurement, Time and Space, appear here blurred together. In a corner, a narrow tower made of sculpted cast bronze candles refers to the artist’s body size (Candle Column (Selfportrait)). The original wax sculpture was built up by extinguishing the flame of each candle with the next.
Duration is subjective, it is a variable moment intensified by love, stretched by boredom, sped up by competition… And sometimes opened by creative emotion, that ‘cosmic memory […] that frees human beings from their own plane or level and makes creators of them, adequate to the whole movement of creation.’1
Alicja Kwade is an artifex of cosmic memory, an alchemical artist who rather than changing lead into gold keeps asking fundamental questions about our origin, our place in universe, our future, and deconstructing what we think of as our most familiar reality, uncovering mysterious, previously unknown details, measure by measure.
No answers here, just more questions…