Manon de Boer
with Pavel Büchler, Milan Grygar, VALIE EXPORT and Hreinn Fridfinnsson

There are abysses of silence within me 
Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

What is silence made of? How to portray it? What is its image? Does nothingness have a substance? Is invisibility a form of absence? How to disappear completely? A void is at the core of the 11th chapter of Moving Image Department; an emptiness (of image, of sound, of form, of matter); breath and breathlessness (conditions of life and death, barometers of spasmatic desire and its body without organs); the space without volume but reflection and echo (an ultimate flatness of sensation, and the paradox of its excess). Listening to the image’s silence, this exhibition choreographs sonic vibrations and perceptual mirages in a post-Cagean vacuum of senses and experience.

The cinematic work of Manon de Boer interrogates the liminal areas of sound and vision while Pavel Büchler’s practice concentrates on the ephemeral and the neglected, “the closing of the gap between the ‘no’ and the ‘thing’”. Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s lyrical compositions portray the thing’s essence and its silent double while VALIE EXPORT reunites the poetic and the political in a love-embracing gesture of the breath. “The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence”, Clarice Lispector observes. Silence is what does remain. Is. “And in the instant resides its own is. I want to capture my is.” Its echo and refrain; its own breath. 

Here all is distance; there it was breath
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eight Elegy 

Curated by Adam Budak

National Gallery Prague - Trade Fair Palace (Veletržní palác)