Dates: 29.07.2014 – 14.08.2014

“You paint with memory when you’re here, there’s no such thing as objectivity. You’re painting from the memory of yesterday morning, we always see with memory… but seeing as everyone’s memory’s different we can’t be looking at the same thing, can we? We’re all on our own…”

– David Hockney, A Bigger Picture.

One must not think the above words of Hockney relate to memory, nor that the “here” he refers to is a specific one: his interest lies in the way in which forms are encountered and mediated by, and with, that which is not them.

“World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. Yet the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.”

– Martin Heidegger, On the origin of the work of art.

“World” here occupies the same place as the “memory” to which Hockney refers; it is a claim about the minimal distance that is a condition of any encounter. Concepts and sensible forms can only exist within contradistinction to each other. In other words, that this is a condition of cognition: the thing can most precisely be articulated by the space between itself and its opposite. It is in this ‘in-between’ that Rabie’s work as a whole operates, and does so using a seemingly modest exploration of the relation between the earth that has been given, by man, both form and meaning, and that which has merely been given meaning, and remains as of yet unformed. The strife of this relationship is, as such, exemplified by the title of the exhibition, which never quite meets itself, and which cannot be made to quietly go away.