The Geometry of a Hole 55th October Salon, Belgrade

Belgrade Serbia – it's a city that’s been torn apart by history several times in the last 100 years. It’s also host to the annual October Salon, which this year, it’s 55th, included artists like Simon Denny and Liam Gillick as well as others from Belgrade making work that referenced history, the past and its ever-present present. Curated by Nicholaus Schafhausen and Vanessa Joan Müller, the exhibition was called “Disappearing Things.”  For the catalogue, I wrote “The Geometry of a Hole” about pataphysics, ghosts, technology, holes, Snapchat and history and how history tore holes – some literal others less so – in the work in the show as well as the exhibition space itself.

The essay starts below and you can read a pdf of it here:

1. Ghosts in the Desert

Start in Las Vegas and end with Marilyn Monroe. Somehow between the two we will get to Belgrade, but all thanks to technology because neither Vegas nor Marilyn are here what they seem. They come at us unannounced, their iconic power drained, appropriated, so we’re never wholly sure what they are. Las Vegas is reduced to shots of a city shimmering in the desert, white with heat and Marilyn’s voice the only clue to her identity. Her breathy whisper is attached to another woman’s life and memories as if to undo both women. In this year’s October Salon, history is torn asunder, memory appropriated, ghosts float free, and technology provides the tools that keep the haunting alive.