Expanding from the artist’s ongoing exploration of infrastructure, authenticity, and value, Bliss Point brings together a new body of work and a large-scale site-specific installation by Melle Nieling. The works consider opacity as a material and tactic of artistic production, with a particular focus on post-truth politics and mechanisms of authority.
In food engineering, the term “Bliss Point” refers to the optimised threshold of sweetness: so sweet, but not sweet enough to cloy. The manufacturing of sweetness is itself a form of control: a technology that mediates our sensorium, rendering what is true impossible to parse. Expanding this apparatus to information politics, this exhibition enquires into opacity as an infrastructure of governance, through which authorities are legitimised and maintained.
Opacity in this show – architectural, optical, material – is deployed both as an act of concealment and a deliberate strategy of provocation. Drawing on science fiction, military sabotage manuals, and illicit spaces – from forgotten biopolitical archives to telecommunication interception facilities like Room 641A – Nieling transforms the exhibition site into a dreamlike environment that is at once banal and eerie. Audiences are invited to move towards, but never through, a restricted archive and an enclosed corridor, encountering an endless churn of fictional conspiracies, commercial slops, and aspirational mottos.
While in The X-Files, “The Truth is Out There” implied that truth was a hidden object – a suppressed file or a biological specimen that could be found if one looked hard enough – we live in a time where our relationship to truth is manufactured, not just through obfuscation, but through overexposure to multiple, competing truths.
Against a slow, collective epistemic exhaustion in which the collapse of the real is radically accepted, Bliss Point positions us between aspiration and paranoia, naivety and irreverence. It asks: what happens when fidelity and realism are completely destabilised by noise and dispersion? Is there still room for revelation in how we know?