Tendrils

We have grown accustomed to imagining time as a river flowing in a single, uninterrupted line, moving inexorably from the past towards the future, from the familiar “before” to the “after”. This schematisation of time—its neat arrangement like beads added one by one to a string—tempts us to speak of different successive events as though they were taking place simultaneously, merely in different locations. A closer look at the histories of different cultures, however, reveals that such a conception is far from universal. Here, we can trace the branching, splitting and suspension of time: in celestial cycles and the changing seasons, in beliefs in rebirth, in travelling and divination through dreams, or in religious and magical rituals. These cultural manifestations reflect a sense of wonder at the very nature of time: its layering upon itself and the doubling of the fabric of experience, which creates continuity and flow, projects meaning where none previously existed, and sustains the desire to begin again—to renew, recreate and replace. Tendrils, a joint exhibition by Belgian artist Tom Hallet and Stanislav Zábrodský, speculates on time winding through infinite folds, where pulsating lines delineate open-ended stories and swollen senses blur the boundaries between body and nature, dreaming and wakefulness.

Let us therefore follow the course of the tendril’s undulating, supple body, which entices us to leave the well-trodden path and seek support in the images and materials themselves. The swarming biomorphic lines in Stanislav Zábrodský’s concrete reliefs originate in the frozen backgrounds of classic animated cartoons, yet are left at the mercy of the material’s gradual transformation and degradation over the immensely extended timescales of geological processes that are almost impossible for us to imagine. The membranous structures of Tom Hallet’s sculptures, disturbingly reminiscent of the skin of a (non-)human body, may succumb to decay all too quickly, but at the same time allow the identity of the artwork itself to be continually transformed or renewed—a process reflected in its changing title. A deeper descent into the imaginary maw of entangled relationships and temporal folds allows fragments of the traumatic history of queer experience to emerge, projected into the hope for a better future. This is evident both in Hallet’s drawings—letters addressed to queer icons or their aggressors—and in the amphorae/quivers filled with twigs, which refer to the history of the pejorative term “faggot-gatherer”, used for elderly widowed women who eked out a modest living by gathering firewood. It also literally evokes the meaning of baggage, or “something inconvenient that must be carried”, which was subsequently extended into a pejorative term for queer men. One of its etymological variants is also the word “bird”, personified in the exhibition by a taxidermied specimen condemned to eternal imprisonment in frozen time. This embodiment of a death that never ends, a death that is constantly dying, forms one of the folds within the dreamlike world of Tendrils, which brings together intimacy and strange otherness, entangled in the yarn of intersecting narratives unfolding across time.