Cell Project Space

–1, plus One moves through the exhibition as a structuring condition. It introduces a logic of cut and supplementation, where subjectivity is formed through sequences of doubling, libidinal displacements and returns. Across the works, traces of automation of perception appear: film as flicker, the newspaper as cliché, and sound as drone – excess produces voids. Scripts, drawings, glass doors, seals and Hermès curb bits recur in variations and alterations, each staging a relation between control, address, and withdrawal. 

 

Across both floors, in the ‘lobby’, office, front and back gallery, the exhibition operates as a basic feedback system circulating economies of desire, production, and time. The curb bit functions as its ‘source code’ – a simple cybernetic object for regulating bodies and movement, initiating a logic that returns across elements. At once luxury commodity and fetish, it condenses an economic field of tangible exchange and of relation to the other. An industrial hum just audible before entry amplifies from the inside, dislocating the spatial and symbolic threshold through a barely perceptible doubling. Glass panels, leaning on the wall beside two thresholds, hold the possibilities (semantic, symbolic, affective, imaginary, art historical) of ‘door’ as an entry/exit configuration, reflecting visitors back into the system of which they are momentarily a part. These repetitions and omissions turn signification in on itself, testing what registers as difference and where thresholds begin to dissolve. The exhibition approaches its elements in a process of ‘montage’, as if a film neither fixed nor linear; assembled in real time, cut and edited by each recipient. Subjectivation is registered in these circuits as delays, gaps, intervals and recursions, as the labour of staying in relation to a structure that shifts with each iteration.

Johannes Porsch develops displays that operate as performative sets – objects that articulate the conditions of their own visibility. In dialogue with post-minimal and post-conceptual strategies, they foreground use-value and destabilise autonomy by rendering its heteronomous supports. These structures sustain positions and enable relations, anticipating events while modulating presence. Abstraction does not generalise; it fractures reflexivity, revealing labour as both structural and obscured. What appears autonomous is revealed as contingent, on holding, showing, connecting. Status – objectal or relational – is the effect of ongoing negotiation.