Spring is the season we load with the most expectation. It is also the season that keeps withdrawing, arriving late, or cold, or briefly, or not quite as imagined.
When Plato used the word pharmakon in the Phaedrus, he meant poison. His translators wrote remedy. Both are correct: the ancient Greek word names an inherently ambiguous agent that can both heal and harm, with its power lying in its paradoxical nature. Jacques Derrida writes forty pages to show what happened when translators chose between the two words. In choosing, they miss the point; some things have to be left untranslatable to not become something else entirely.
The exhibition proceeds from the observation that transformation has always required vulnerability. Before pharmacy became a science, the apothecary worked in the indeterminate space between knowledge and superstition, cure and harm, and to seek out that help was already an act of trust — in the person administering it, in inherited knowledge, in the body’s own capacity to do something with what it was given. Risk was the passage through which change became possible. Bitter Spring argues that this tolerance for the unknown has been systematically dismantled. We now live inside landscapes and systems designed to eliminate the variable: to anticipate desire, to deliver frictionlessly, and to guarantee that the outcome matches the expectation. The result is a profound incapacity to encounter something without knowing in advance what it will do.
Today we no longer have the stomach for this. We live inside landscapes and systems designed to eliminate the variable: to know what you want before you do, to deliver it frictionlessly, and to ensure the outcome matches the expectation. The past decades have been spent moving toward precision: the promise that the right intervention, correctly personalised and engineered, will produce the right result you are looking for. We have become very bad at accepting to not know what something will do to us before it does it.
The seven artists in Bitter Spring do not claim to resolve this. With a shared fidelity to difficulty, they restore the unknown to its proper place.Kairi Tokoro’s kinetic sculpture produces sound’s the residue of contact between wood, washi paper, and mineral pigment — a rhythm that exists only in the encounter between its materials. Bora Baboçi’s paintings make bodies and landscape into sites of exchange: a night journey through the silence of the Saharan desert, moving always towards Zenith Hour, an obliterating white that no gesture can reach with any certainty of being received. Inés Cárdó reimagines purple maize as oracle and offering, pairing it with gold-painted teeth; drawing on pre-Columbian practices of communion with natural forces, the work proposes a mode of relation grounded not in extraction, but in reciprocity. Ben Grosse-Johannboecke’s metal barriers seal off new wood across three compartments: whether they are withholding the cure or protecting the viewer from harm, there is no way to know. Renid Tosuni presents a small clay bed blanketed in felt, its glass shards arranged in a motif recalling Balkan blankets — a work that holds the memory of the artist’s great- grandmother, an alternative healer who mixed finely broken glass and wrapped it around the bodies of the sick. Felix Murphy’s paintings take their cue from the ancient temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, where the sick slept overnight in hope of dreaming their own cure. Edoardo Rito’s work is down the stairs. Like everything stored in anticipation, what is delivered is never quite what was promised.