INTERSTATE OF MIND 25.02 – 26.03.2023

Jenny Brosinski, Corydon Cowansage, Max Frintrop, Tatjana Gerhard, Nicholas William Johnson, Judit Kristensen, Jean-Pierre Temmerman, Julia Trybala, Sharon Van Overmeiren

The group exhibition INTERSTATE OF MIND was born from the feeling of being mesmerised by 'something', something mysterious, something not quite right that just makes us feel drawn to it. The line between reality and dream blurs, we experience a desire to disappear into something and discover another world. The participating artists in this exhibition each in their unique way bring about something that cannot be captured at a glance. As a viewer, you are always on the border between reality and dream and it plays on the feeling of being mesmerized.

*Now my inability to sleep ceased to frighten me. What was there to be afraid of? Think of the advantages! Now the hours from ten at night to six in the morning belonged to me alone. Until now, a third of every day had been used up by sleep. But no more. No more. Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else’s, all mine.
I could use this time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands on me. Yes, that was it. I had expanded my life.

I had increased it by a third. You are probably going to tell me that this is biologically abnormal. And you may be right. And maybe someday in the future I’ll have to pay back the debt I’m building up by continuing to do this biologically abnormal thing. Maybe life will try to collect on the expanded part―this “advance” it is paying me now. This is a groundless hypothesis, but there is no ground for negating it, and it feels right to me somehow. Which means that in the end the balance sheet of borrowed time will even out.

Honestly, though, I didn’t give a damn, even if I had to die young. The best thing to do with a hypothesis is to let it run any course it pleases. Now, at least, I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful. My hands weren’t empty anymore. Here I was―alive, and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn’t being consumed any longer. Or at least there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed, and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life without that feeling might go on forever, but it would have no meaning at all. I saw that with absolute clarity now.

(Excerpt of a text by Haruki Murakami, Sleep)*