THE SPACE //

presents

O P A C I T Y A N D L I G H T

works and creative productions by

GEORGES ADÉAGBO TAQWA ALI RAHEL BRUNS SARICE BRUDET INAH CHOE

LORENZ EGLE STEFFEN JOPP ANDREY KLASSEN ELISA MANIG MORITZ NEUHOFF

SOFIA SEIDI ROBIN RHODE NICK WACHS MEGGIE WEINHEIMER

The exhibition „OPACITY AND LIGHT“ brings together the work and creative productions of 14 international

contemporary artists who explore the dynamic interplay between Opacity and Light - between what

reveals itself and what remains partially concealed. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and spatial

interventions, the exhibition approaches both light and opacity as aesthetic materials and as

philosophical conditions shaping perception, relation and coexistence.

„ THE RIGHT TO OPACITY WOULD BE THE REAL FOUNDATION OF RELATION, IN FREEDOMS“

- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)

The exhibition builds on the concept of opacity articulated by poet, novelist, and philosopher Édouard

Glissant (1928–2011) – the right not to be fully understood - and places it in dialogue with light as a

metaphor for revelation, knowledge and clarity – yet also for exposure, classification and control.

Glissant’s poetics of opacity proposes an onto-epistemological resistance to rendering the other

transparent. At its core lies the dynamic between what becomes visible and what remains irreducibly

opaque. In his Poetics of Relation (1990), opacity resists reduction and total comprehension; it refuses the

impulse to make individuals, cultures, or histories fully legible. The „Right to Opacity” thus becomes an

ethical and political stance against the violence of reducing others to a known, categorized truth, which

is often a tool of domination. Relation, for Glissant, is grounded not in transparency, but in respect for

irreducible complexity.

Opacity preserves singularity, difference, and the layered nature of lived experience. Opacity is not

darkness - it is depth. It is an accumulation of histories, bodies, languages, cultural crossings, and memories

that cannot be translated into a single dominant light. It is the recognition that every being, every history

carries layers that cannot - and need not - be fully disclosed. In this sense, opacity also preserves mystery

and magic – understood not as superstition but as the living depth of the world. It arises where something

exceeds comprehension yet remains present.

Opacity, in this context, is not understood as a lack of clarity but as an autonomous mode of knowing. It

challenges the Western assumption that universal understanding is either desirable or possible, proposing

instead a "world mentality" that embraces diverse, untranslatable perspectives.

This exhibition unfolds in dialogue with Europe’s Enlightenment - the Siècle des Lumières, the Age of

Reason - a period that positioned light as the central metaphor of progress, emancipation and rational

knowledge. Across eighteenth century Europe, a vision emerged of humanity stepping out of the shadow

into rational clarity. Yet Illumination also interrogates, surveils, and extracts. It exposes, classifies, and

renders visibility in ways that can flatten difference. Every act of revelation produces shadow.

This exhibition considers the threshold between these two gestures: When does light liberate? When does

it erase and flatten complexity? When does clarity become overexposure? What kind of light do we need

today - a light that dominates, or a light that listens?

Immanuel Kant defined Enlightenment as humanity’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity through

the courage to use reason. Yet this exhibition asks: whose reason, whose light, and at what cost? Hannah

Arendt warned that excessive illumination can destroy the fragile space of appearance where plurality

thrives. To exist together requires not total exposure but relational space - intervals of shadow where

difference can breathe.

Thinkers such as Voltaire championed reason against superstition. Denis Diderot and

the Encyclopédie sought to catalogue and illuminate all branches of knowledge. David Hume examined

the foundations of human understanding. Light, in this European project, promised emancipation. Yet the

metaphor of illumination also carried ambivalence. To illuminate is to expose; to clarify is to classify.

Enlightenment rationality traveled alongside colonial expansion, scientific taxonomy, and extractive

systems that rendered lands, bodies, and cultures transparent to European scrutiny.

Glissant’s opacity offers a counterpoint to these universalizing ambitions. Where Enlightenment sought

transparency and universality, opacity proposes relation without reduction. Light, in this sense, becomes

relational rather than interrogative - illuminating without dissolving difference. Glissant’s opacity does not

reject light; it reorients it. It touches without dissolving. It reveals without demanding transparency. Opacity

is thus a form of care. He emphasizes that accepting another's opacity does not mean a lack of

connection; rather, it makes genuine exchange possible by removing the demand for conformity.

Throughout art history, light has functioned as revelation - from the divine radiance of Caravaggio’s

chiaroscuro to J.M.W. Turner’ atmospheric dissolutions, where form dissolves into radiance, allowing light

to exceed contour. Yet even in the Baroque illumination, shadow was never the enemy; it was the

condition of depth. Without shadow, no volume. Without opacity, no form. In the twentieth century,

abstract painters allowed light to emanate from color fields that seemed to absorb as much as they emit,

transforming perception into experience. Contemporary installation practices further shift the viewer from

observers to participants: light becomes material, atmosphere, and encounter - experienced rather than

merely seen.

In these practices, shadow is not ignorance but depth. Without opacity, light has no resonance.

As Gaston Bachelard suggessts in The Poetics of Space, intimacy resides in protected interiors - corners,

nests, shells. To dwell is to remain partially hidden. To belong is not to be fully exposed but to be held within

shared atmospheres.

Poetic language similarly sustains relational opacity. Paul Celan speaks of language that reaches

“toward an other” - not to possess, but to encounter. Inger Christensen structures her poems through

mathematical sequences that reveal ecological interdependence without dissolving singularities. Each

element exists in relation, yet remains irreducible.

The exhibition resonates with thinkers who extend or critically reframe Glissant’s relational

poetics. Christina Sharpe reflects on the ongoing afterlives of colonial histories and the forms of visibility

and invisibility they generate. Françoise Lionnet explores creolization and translation as relational

processes that resist fixed identities. Fred Moten articulates fugitivity and refusal as aesthetic and political

strategies that challenge dominant regimes of legibility. Chus Martínez emphasizes the poetic and

speculative capacities of art to imagine collective futures beyond extractive epistemologies.

Within contemporary ecological thought, light and opacity also shift beyond the human and

anthropocentrism. Donna Haraway proposes “staying with the trouble” - remaining within complexity

rather than clarifying them into simplified narratives. Human-centred Enlightenment placed humanity at

the apex of reason and visibility. Ecosystems acknowledge that humans are not the sole bearers of light.

They operate through entanglement, invisibility, and reciprocal obscurity beyond human centrality:

mycelial networks communicate underground; plants photosynthesize; oceans refract light beyond

human perception; stones retain geological memory. The world is not illuminated for us - it glows within its

own temporalities.

In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel identifies recognition as fundamental to selfhood: one

becomes oneself through being recognized by another. Yet recognition need not become forced

assimilation and total comprehension. Through Glissant’s lense, recognition does not require total

understanding. You can recognize without fully knowing. That is the ethical innovation of opacity. If Hegel

sought reconciliation of individual and universal, we might propose: reconciliation must preserve opacity.

Collective futures depend not on dissolving individuality into abstract universality, but on the preservation

of singularity within relation. Opacity ensures that individuality is not erased in the name of unity. Light,

when relational, allows connection without assimilation. Together, they model a form of coexistence that

resists both homogenization and fragmentation.

In an age of radical exposure - of data extraction, surveillance, algorithmic profiling, perpetual visibility -

of what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as the ‘society of transparency’, opacity becomes an

ethical gesture. To protect the right not to be fully known is to defend plurality. To share light without

erasing difference is to practice care. What remains partially hidden - layers of memory, cultural

translation, diasporic relation, ecological entanglement - is not a deficit but a field of resonance.

This perspective also gestures toward older, more nature-centred modes of consciousness. Ancient

cosmologies and Indigenous epistemologies long understood light and shadow not as opposites, but as

complementary forces within cyclical systems. Knowledge was embedded in ritual, in seasonal rhythms,

in attentive observation of land and sky. Such practices recognized mystery not as ignorance to be

conquered, but as an integral dimension of existence.

The works assembled in the Opacity and Light move between concealment and revelation, luminosity

and density. Some invite immersion into shadow; others emit quiet radiance. Together they create a field

of resonance in which perception becomes a practice of attentiveness and imagination a political

resource. They engage with what resists immediate legibility or remains only partially accessible: layers of

memory, processes of cultural translation, diasporic entanglements, and the unseen dimensions of social

and ecological systems.

The exhibition proposes a poetics of coexistence and evokes a slower perceptual register, one that honors

opacity as protection and light as mediation - where the unseen, the quiet, and the non-extractable

become perceptible as aesthetic and political qualities. Community is sustained through mutual

recognition of depth. It is not built through total clarity but through mutual attunement. To coexist is to

accept that the other exceeds our comprehension. The mastery required to confront today’s global

challenges is not technological supremacy alone, but the cultivation of relational intelligence - an ethics

rooted in difference, reciprocity, and ecological consciousness.

The exhibition invites viewers to embrace ambiguity not as a deficit, but as a form of knowledge - and to

understand that what cannot be fully seen may still be deeply felt. Light as a medium of relation is what

makes relational understanding possible. Opacity does not obstruct; it protects depth. Light in this sense

is not an instrument of control, but a material of empathy. The realization of freedom today lies not in total

clarity, but in sustaining a relational equilibrium - where individuality persists, opacity is protected, and

community emerges as a dynamic, living system.

Sources:

Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter

Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant: Kultur & Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt

Édouard Glissant: Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite

Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Archipelago

Byung-Chul Han: The Crisis of Narration

Byung-Chul Han: Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phänomenologie des Geistes

Axel Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition

Françoise Lionnet: The Creolization of Theory.

Fred Moten In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition.

Knepper, Steven; Stoneman, Ethan; Wyllie, Robert: Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction.

Chus Martinez: The Complex Answer

Hartmut Rosa: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

Christina Sharpe: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition

About THE SPACE //:

THE SPACE // is an an independent cultural initiative and exhibition concept within a curated format

initiated by the artist Sarice Brudet. Beyond exhibitions, THE SPACE // serves as a curated platform for art

mediation, dialogue, discourse, and interdisciplinary connections. Our goal is to promote contemporary

art and to create a space for encounters and synergies. At its core are community, togetherness, and

humanity. All resources that flow into the project remain within the project. This reflects our non-profit

ethos, our primary commitment to supporting artists, and our focus on cultural exchange.

The subject matter deals with cultural complexities in a global context, humanity as a practice,

coexistence, diversity, identity, social structures, the new sublime, relational aesthetics and the relation

between the human – technology – nature - biodiversity and the cosmos. Art is there to remind us of

humanity and the art of curation is to listen to and take care of the voices of each art work and the

human being behind the work. THE SPACE // wants to create a surrounding to make these voices heard,

seen and felt in relation to other art works, the viewer, the observer and to foster a mindful engagement,

critical thinking, personal interpretation and the sensibility to enjoy, to feel, to question and to encounter

a work of art with an open mind.

CURATORIAL MANIFESTO:

The exhibitions at THE SPACE // center around the human mind, body and soul and explore how society,

technology, and its relation to nature and the cosmos transform and shape the Self.

How do the Self and the perception of the Self correlate with the outside and its surrounding in a seemingly

unpredictable world shaped by globalization, technology and climate change?

How can the Self retain optimism to create change and disconnect from set and conditioned

perceptions, preconceptions and prejudices to alter these perspective, question the status quo, and selflimiting beliefs?

The artists included in the exhibitions explore notions and reasoning of contemporary consciousness,

constructive abstraction, inner and outer worlds and cultural and social complexities in a global context.

Questions center around the intuitive mind vs the rational, resonance, energies and frequencies,

concepts of time and balance, empathy, and cultural diversity.

For Édouard Glissant (French writer, poet and philosopher), the "poetics of the relationship" (Poétique de

la Relation) stands for a human identity that is defined by the variety of relationships and not by an ethnic

one, namely descent. In this context, he distinguishes between “globalization” (Fr. mondialisation) and

“globality” (Fr. mondialité): “What is called globalization is assimilation at the lowest level, the rule of

multinational corporations, standardization and unregulated liberalism at the markets of the world. But for

me it is just the flip side of a wonderful reality that I call globality.” – Glissant. Globality and globalization

are two sides of the same phenomenon. By "globalization" Glissant means the capitalist project of

multinational corporations and the associated cultural leveling (standardization). GLOBALITY, on the other

hand, harbors productive potential through creative interactions between cultures. This is how complex

cultures (cultures composites) arise.

The exhibitions at THE SPACE // would like to emphasize humanity as a practice and the optimism of

GLOBALITY. Each exhibition explores different nuances of this subject matter and streams of thoughts.

THE SPACE //

Kaiser-Wilhem-Str. 14

20355 HAMBURG

Wed – Sat: 12h00 – 18h30

Or appointment

E-Mail: info@thespace.city

Instagram: @thespace.city

www.thespace.city

works on show

recent

HURTING SCULPTURES at Bilker Bunker, Düsseldorf, Germany

01.10.2025 - 29.10.2025

with Jenny Ayala and Stephan Marienfeld

see the full documentation here

Sonja Yakovleva, courtesy Robert Grunenberg, Berlin