Exhibition text by rana elnemr and Lina Attalah

Doors are rolled up and down, reflected and reflecting, obscured, protruding, inked and engraved. In this movement, a prolonged, yet transient moment settles. It is a moment marked by injury, pain and angst. It is a moment summoning countless engrams, including from writers, artists and scientists, preoccupied with capturing meaning in such moments. Engrams, the sets of neuronal groups where memorized experiences are stored, are assembled in this exhibition for a joint initiation of a new lunar cycle.

Thoth, the moon deity represented by the curve of the ibis' beak and who is also called ‘sickle head’, informs a homemaking process with care, sharpness and determination. A teacher, a protector, Thoth calls on the connection between events, people and works of art unfolding in between. 

In this moment of anticipation, artworks, books, letters, friends, buildings and trees are in spatial and temporal company to each other. They are all entangled in their intimate processes of becoming. Everyone is here in full tactility; closed books and cupboards that lie in stillness, light-tight rolled paper and tree stem wood rings, wombs and walls. They are all portals for that which is possible. They are here, simmering the necessary knowledge, in the darkness that afflicts yet guards transition and germination. They come together in the space of Goethe, the solitary author who wrote, and wrote, and wrote, before opening his pages out in collaborative acts of cultural practice. 

Those present in this exhibition, living and nonliving matter, meet through reverberating acts and reproductions that they write on each other’s stories. They observe patterns, shadows and meanings across the different places, times and experiences they come from. They point to awareness of complex power dynamics during phases of shifts and transitions. They seek insight in an electrostatic moment of action.