Introduction

As you enter this exhibition, isn’t it clear? You are the visitor, this is the exhibition space, and the things you see are the artworks. There are distinct and separate entities: you, the space, the objects in it. But are they really separate? 

Ryan Gander’s One Hundred Things Twice unfolds as an inventory of possible realities: things that can be thought multiple times. Developed for the annual program CAPTCHA Realism at Salzburger Kunstverein, the exhibition unfolds through pairs, echoes, near-matches and slight misalignments. 

Classical logic tells us that everything must either be or not be.[1] A body is here, or it is there. A statement is true, or it is false. Yet Gander’s practice has long been invested in precisely those situations in which such certainty begins to fail. His works often operate in the brief delay before meaning settles. They ask what happens when the thing refuses to be exhausted by one description.  

In quantum theory, an object can technically exist in more than one state at once.[2] Something similar happens in One Hundred Things Twice. A thing twice is not a copy. It may be an echo, a ghost, a front and a back, a left and a right, a beginning and an end. One thing happened; another almost did. One thing sits before you; another version of it begins to form in memory. The exhibition is thus less a collection of stable things than a field of relations between them.

The title of the show suggests enumeration, perhaps even the logic of a database: one hundred things ordered and counted. But a hundred things are never just a hundred things. Each object enters into relation with all the others; meaning does not belong to the object alone, nor to the artist, nor to the viewer. It circulates between them. It behaves like a guest that becomes a host, or a host who suddenly discovers they are no longer fully at home.

What if there were no nouns? What if things did not exist first as bounded entities, but were made through relation from the beginning? Gander’s exhibition seems to ask this question. A work is not merely an object placed in space. It is the time it takes to notice it, the expectation it interrupts, the behaviour it produces, the other works it calls to mind, the route one takes towards it and away from it. 

There is no divine position from which everything is visible at once. And perhaps this is where Gander’s exhibition becomes unexpectedly egalitarian. If every thing contains the idea of another possible thing, if every world is accompanied by the world that could have happened, then no single reality can claim absolute authority over the others. 

So, isn’t it clear? You are the visitor, this is the exhibition space, and the things you see are the artworks: each is changed by the others. 

What a strange feeling: this connection not bound to space, this sensation of being in two—or more—places at the same time. I could have sworn I had been here before.

Text by Mirela Baciak.

[1]  Classical logic permits only exact reasoning. It assumes that perfect knowledge always exists and the law of excluded middle can always be applied. The law of excluded middle can be expressed by the propositional formula P V ¬P. It means that ‘everything must either be or not be‘. Any form of logic that adheres to the law of excluded middle can‘t handle degrees of truth.

[2] In quantum theory an object can technically be in more than one place at the same time as a consequence of the wave-like character of microscopic particles. Such quantum state is called superposition. Where gravity works, superpositions can never actually be observed - all we can see is the consequences of their existence, after individual waves of a superposition interfere with each other. Thus, we can never observe an atom in its indeterminate state, or being in two places at once, only the resulting consequences, and physical reality is not determined until the act of measurement takes place and “solidifies” the situation into one state or another.