ANTWERP.- “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. We never discard our childhood. We never escape it completely. We relive fragments of it through others. We live buried layers through others. We live through others’ projections of the unlived selves.”
Anaïs Nin, Diaries, vol. 4 (1944-1947)
Most of the things we surround ourselves with will quietly and effortlessly outlive us. It’s a disconcerting thought, one that tends to creep up on us in moments of transition – moving, migration, displacement or death. The objects we’ve gathered over the years, whether accumulated by habit or carefully curated, take on a life of their own – a second, a third, and so on. Personal belongings end up at flea markets or are auctioned off; once-cherished books find new shelves; precious jewellery is traded for quick cash; and even the homes we live in are handed down and reoccupied by future generations. In the vast circulation of material things, we are but temporary tenants – visitors, passersby – with a short life set between cardboard boxes. Such is the human condition. Packing and unpacking become the quasi-ritual gestures that mark an end or a beginning – relatively speaking. We are not masters in our own house, as Freud once wrote, and perhaps it’s worth taking him literally. Our possessions constitute a kind of material memory – a personal archive that we try to manage, maintain, and protect. This compulsion, or “archive fever” (Derrida) reflects a deep-seated desire to hold on to something – objects, stories, fragments – in an attempt to preserve something beyond our eventual disappearance. But the very act of preservation always carries a risk: the risk of distortion, of misremembering, of losing what we meant to save. And the more we try, the more memory seems to slip through our fingers – exposed to loss, repression, and oblivion. This is the inherently melancholic nature of every archive.
Berlin-based artist Umut Yasat began his long-term project Der Stapel (The Stack) in 2014. At first, he built stacks of his own drawings and paintings, piling them until they reached his own height – a kind of sculptural self-portrait composed of personal artifacts. Over time, he broadened his material vocabulary to include found objects, trinkets, and personal items – whatever life threw at him – assigning each stack a consequential number. This accumulative approach evokes the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, an extensive series of cardboard boxes archiving his personal life. Yasat’s vertical stack sculptures function as cross-sections of the everyday, snapshots shaped by chance encounters and the material poetry of the mundane – a sensibility not unlike the Nouveau Réalisme of artists like Daniel Spoerri. Yet, the most profound influence is Roman Opalka’s epic project “1965/1-∞” (1965-2011), a rigorous, meticulous attempt to visualize the continuum of time. Yasat’s remark that he doesn’t think in three dimensions certainly points to a deeper engagement with the fourth dimension: time itself, treated as a medium of narrative layering. For his current exhibition, titled from mine to us to yours to mine, Yasat brings together his signature Stacks with a series of photographs taken in public space. The images capture found arrangements, often incidental, that mirror the stacking logic of his own sculptural work. In doing so, he once again broadens the conceptual reach of his practice, framing the urban fabric as a kind of palimpsest, and hinting that our identities, whether individual or collective, are similarly composed: layered, complex, mutable, shifting.
Pieter Vermeulen
