Gathering is thrilled to announce The Place of Waiting, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at ECHO Cologne featuring Özgür Kar, Louis Morlæ and Tai Shani.

Installation Views (3 images)

The works within The Place of Waiting take archetypal imagery associated with the state of suspension between life and death as their point of departure. Each artist finds moments of poignancy and reinvention in the coagaulation of myths surrounding immortality, or the interstices where soul and body diverge.

Selected Works (4 images)

Tai Shani’s practice is marked by an interest in arcane histories and rituals; through her sculpture, she reimagines their attendant artefacts and proposes new ones for their speculative reinvention. She draws especial inspiration from the documentation of intact ceremonial burial chambers: sites where bodies become matter and the degraded material of clothing, hair and skin mingles with the permanency of stone, jewellery, bone and teeth. A Hundred Thousand Ghosts II, 2023 invokes this alchemical mixture of objects and matter in the burial site: encased in a glass casket, an object resembling an elongated spine is adorned with golden talismans and electric flowers that illuminate and dim at the pace of breath. The vitrine-like casket evokes preservation: a life both attenuated and sustained, metamorphosed into something not quite alive but not yet dead.

Louis Morlæ has taken this in-between state as the subject of his recent body of work, drawing upon portrayals of the inhabitants of Purgatory in late Gothic and early Renaissance art. His sculptures are suspended between life and death - between machine and organism. Like the souls in the apocalyptic visions of Brueghel the Elder and Bosch, Morlæ's robotic creatures possess an air of expectancy, as if waiting for their transition into one state or the other to be complete. With drooping eyes and plush bodies, the marked vulnerability of the figures’ physicality belies their ultimate potential for immortality, as automated machines immune to bodily decay.

Özgür Kar’s animations are similarly placed in a state of suspension. Locked inside the bounds of their screens, the characters appear stuck in two-dimensional compression, moving and speaking whilst mired in stasis. In his 2021 Storage Drama series, ‘Death’ is personified as a soliloquising, musical instrument-playing skeleton, trapped within television sets mounted inside flight cases. These skeleton figures play upon the Medieval trope of the Danse Macabre - an allegorical formulation of death as a vaudeville parade of the living, being guided to their demise by grinning cadavers. In Kar’s work, Death appears almost obsolete, relegated to a state of circular, disjointed performance - a fragmented set-piece from an imaginary absurdist play.