In accordance this year’s central theme of Fragmented Subjectivity, Crone will be hosting Fold, a focused group exhibition that examines the notion of folding and unfolding within the work of a diverse range of artists. The exhibition is curated by Damian Lentini, deputy director of the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, and brings together works by Susi Gelb, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ndayé Kouagou, Joanna Louca, Charlotte Posenenske, Stefan Ludes, Stefan Reiterer, Sung Tieu, Ben Wadler and Hamid Zénati.

Referencing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of Baroque architecture as an endless process enfolding – drawing and multiplying examples of Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic and Classical motifs – the various folds that constitute the current exhibition will similarly be situated within a dynamic of excision and excess; reproduction and extension. In so doing, it will explore how contemporary artists construct and produce folds between a rich miscellany of forms, images, objects, texts, indices and writing; a process of addition and grafting from which further series of folds can be generated.

Understood as a smooth curve or vector that occurs within both physical and conceptual space, the works within the exhibition all draw upon strategies of concealing/revealing and absorption/refraction in order reveal the manner in which contemporary subjectivities are constituted just as much by partial or cursory vignettes as they are by supposedly singular or fixed modes of perception. This can be seen in many of the works that are characterised by moments of uncertainty or multiplicity with respect to their potential decoding, while other evoke shifting or transcendental forms of aesthetic reception that in turn questions the primacy or mastery of the gaze.

Constantly in flux, such processes of artistic (un)folding all harbour the potential to engender not only new spatial and formal configurations, but also new modes of knowledge production that can be shared amongst select groups and publics. Viewed in this manner, the act of folding is deployed in the service of destabilising the concept of the modern subject, alongside the notions of ownership, control, and optical sovereignty that has accompanied discussions of the viewer from the Enlightenment through to the contemporary era.