For Some Time I’ve been Standing
group exhibition with
an
accompanying public program
For Some Time I've been Standing traces gestures of rehearsal, repetition and return, asking what it means to pause, to stand still, or to remain in motion. It gathers works by Chupan Atashi, Manon de Boer, Michael Kleine and Brigitte Louter, alongside a workshop by Emma Ydiers and a performance by Astrid Specht Seeberg, in the Old House at Kunsthal Gent.
The exhibition enters into dialogue with the fresco on the back wall of the Old House, a damaged mural from the fifteenth century that the artworks reiterate as a palimpsest, responding to it and reimagining it. Immediately drawing the gaze, the fresco tends to direct the body's movement through the space. It invites the eye to wander over its worn and bodily surface, to follow the contours of its gaps and cracks, to glide across the smooth areas and to acknowledge its most vulnerable parts.
Its title comes from Kathy Acker's 1993 novel My Mother: Demonology, from a passage in which the narrator describes standing before a white stucco wall on a raised white road, surrounded by masses of luggage and bags. Integral to Acker's writing is a practice of rewriting and reinterpretation, often plagiarising other sources as her own. That method mirrors the exhibition's own impetus, its conversation with the fresco as a surface to be reworked rather than preserved.
The public programme extends these questions. Emma Ydiers's workshop Relating to Lesbian Archives reflects on the ongoing erasure of queer narratives and the potential of archiving as an activist method. Astrid Specht Seeberg's performance Clayplay, developed through a series of performances in different environments, invites a group from the audience to build clay masks in a blind improvisation, working with the tangible weight of the material under the artist's guidance.