06 | Exhibitions * ATMOSPHERIC TENSIONS

ATMOSPHERIC TENSIONS reconceptualizes the exhibition space not as a neutral container, but as a site of sensory profanation and structural friction. This approach draws from the explosive, maximalist installations of Jason Rhoades at the Van Abbemuseum, where the accumulation of materials creates a state of chaotic resonance. We treat the white cube as a territory to be occupied, following the logic of the white atelier and the distributed design protocols found in global biennials. By deploying situational fixers within high-pressure environments like ARCO Art Fair, we transform light and air into construction materials. This is the ontological displacement of the object, where the epistemic synthesis of the project becomes a lived atmospheric event. Here, the exhibition is a durational experiment, a "nature" in itself that demands radical attention and a total immersion into the socioplastic world-system.

Exhibitions are conceived as process-based environments where installations, performances, and site-specific works activate publics. This curatorial practice links art, urban space, and collective experimentation across biennials, museums, and independent platforms.

Exhibitions are situational institutions: temporary, porous, and unstable environments where works are activated rather than displayed. They function less as showcases than as expanded studios, laboratories where devices collide with broader publics and where the conventions of exhibition-making are dismantled. To exhibit here is to rehearse publics, rituals, and collective presence. At the Lagos Biennial 2024, Re-(t)exHile transformed 500 discarded garments into a textile pavilion, confronting the geopolitics of waste and staging debate, care, and performance. In the Guimarães Biennial 2024, Threads of Meaning reframed weaving as both intimate practice and political weapon, entangling craft with urgency. The Trienal Urbanas (I–V) unfolded across plazas and peripheries in Spain and Portugal, treating exhibition as urban rehearsal—of shade, resilience, and civic imagination. At Croatia’s Rigo Gallery and Rabbit Island’s Restoran Splendid, exhibition became cohabitation: shared meals, rotated authorships, and blurred lines between artwork and encounter. Solo and collective shows also carried this unstable ethos. In Madrid, LAPIEZA’s weekly mutations turned exhibition into continuous collective performance, where each new work erased and reconfigured the last. At ARCO Madrid, projects disrupted commodification with unstable furniture, participatory benches, and ephemeral light sculptures that refused permanence. What unites these contexts is the refusal to treat exhibitions as endpoints. They are points of passage, moments where works mutate through encounter and leave resonances that outlast the event. To exhibit here is less a noun than a verb: a practice of activation, rehearsal, and unfinished collectivity.