11.4.-11.5.2025
Susanne Gottberg
Linn Nora Henz
Heidi Holmström
Essi Immonen

A parallel examination of taxonomies of objects, artworks, and exhibitions reveals the contradictory relationship between the presentation of art and (its) order. An artwork’s relation to the exhibition may be one of rejection or adoption, but the examination of the object discloses an inherent lack in its perception—a kind of phantom pain. What invisible meanings could then be discovered?
The framework of SUNNYSIDE’s first exhibition lies in the entanglement of objects and the simultaneous (im)possibilities of perceiving an artwork. The exhibition asks how objects signify and uphold both the context of exhibiting and the places of artworks themselves. The subjects and objects depicted by the works are in an apparent relationship to their referents. They disintegrate into continually redefining paths and trajectories—glass’ outline comes to draw our way of perceiving.
The offered definition of this exhibition reveals itself to be manifold: When stretched to its limits, encounters reach the objects’ idling point. It becomes clear that some(one/thing) was once (t)here. The image of preserving an idea of that object rewinds back to its imagined fragility. It’s not about repelling those propositions, but more rather about concentrating on what one’s perception holds within the circumstance.
The subject-object relationship between the artwork and the observer can moreover be based on a broader, more distant frame of reference. For example, how does one perceive the temporary image made by the performative gesture of skating in figure—and how does it then translate into another form of language: a notation. It comes to dysfunctionally highlight the hardship of ideas in-between authorship, performance, and text. The indistinguishable moment(um) between the performance and the moment a priori to a curtain-call comes forth when a question of preserving a performance—or its asynchronous way of delivering meaning—is asked.

As meaning is literally sanded away, the inter-relationships in-between objects return back to examine the latent potentials within themselves. When active infrastructures are opened up with historical gape—or when material value bypasses its pre-assigned worth—a question emerges: through which categories of value is the act measured upon? Their ability to communicate beyond the facet has come to a halt, and hence the (reflective) surface comes to mirror back to this exhibition and its surveying subject.
Objects have an inevitable potential to be in constant motion, but a question regarding the point of construing arises. An exhibition can indeed be thought of as an object—however, a curatorial situation is not defined through the presence of those objects. A disintegrating path is always followed by an assemblage—thus far, an order cannot be deciphered.

SUNNYSIDE is a not-for-profit art space presenting curated exhibitions. SUNNYSIDE is a second part of an artist-run space PORTLAND in Zürich.