NEW YORK.- The Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art will present "Liquid Concrete," and features Swiss artist Eric Hattan in the main space, with New York based photographer, Zoe Leonard in the lounge and Belgian artist Michel François in the library. An antidote for the over-saturated eye, Eric Hattan’s videos from his work Beton Liquide, or, LIQUID CONCRETE, enable us to take a break between the rush and hurry of our visual world. On fifteen monitors, placed around the gallery, Hattan reveals his camera’s observances. Short, quiet incidents are caught on film and looped, very much like the blowing plastic bag of American Beauty, but without the dramatization, without the artist’s addition of music, melancholy or nostalgia. The works are like video ready-mades, the camera records minor occurrences: a curtain blowing, a basketball thrown through a hoop, water pouring out of a drain pipe, the changing light, cast on a billboard on the side of a building.

 

The minor occurrence is given a moment’s importance, as with Zoe Leonard’s photographs, which depict the urban mystery of plastic bags, caught and blowing on the branches of trees. Michel François’ project, Action/La Plante En Nous is comprised of a series of spontaneous actions, or as he calls them, ’120 moments of irony and beauty.’

 

Taking the incidental as subject matter, their works introduce a new preoccupation at the SI: looking at what happens in the time and space "between", so that this exhibition is portrayed as a sort of intermission. This theme of intermission or entr’acte will recur unexpectedly in the SI’s programming this year, challenging the accepted notion of an exhibition having defined beginning and end points. The repetition and incidental beauty of the works in liquid concrete will serve as a kind of trailer, introducing the idea that exhibitions do not begin or end, but rather flow and linger.