Hidden Passages

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, curatorial discourse has reached a crescendo, to the point where it can sometimes feel as though the contextualization of art is so extensive that it risks overwhelming the very work it is intended to substantiate.

- Ellen Mara De Wachter

This tendency to compulsively explain the works on view can leave little space or time for audiences to come to their own understanding of what is put before them. Instead of according such importance to what we are told, what if we turned to the art’s unknowns: the gaps, ambiguities and enigmas that interpretive tools are seldom calibrated to measure?

In early spring, Kobby Adi’s exhibition, ‘Music’, at London’s Cabinet Gallery included five near-identical works. Each ‘Instrument’ (2023–24) consists of a bimetal thermometer whose dial has been doctored to show, in addition to the ambient temperature, a black wedge indicating the average range of the internal temperature of a specific animal. The sculptures identify mammals – alpaca, goat, rabbit, pig and sheep – that run slightly hotter than healthy humans. Lined up on the wall amid these gauges hung ‘Untitled’ (2023–24), a row of seven tonewood fragments from a luthier’s workshop – some rough-hewn, others finely turned and polished. On the left-most element, someone has drawn an arrow pointing to the internal angle of a roughly L-shaped piece of blonde wood and scribbled: problème!