Props at Galerie Derouillon, Paris

In October, Derouillon presents ‘‘Props’’ a new group exhibition curated by Marion Coindeau including Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Tetsumi Kudō, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, Kirill Savchenkov. The show will gather new productions alongside historical works.

“Props” evokes both a deceptive object and a device that lends support to something else—something it is not, or not quite, something it is not meant to be, or not yet. It unfolds across multiple layers of meaning, seeking to bring together works that resist immediate understanding, that slip away from our gaze. From this playful shift emerges a subtle sense of absence—a destabilizing void through which artists allow the underlying forces of domination, and the images that shape our everyday lives, to surface.

The gathered artists unveil and unsettle implicit social hierarchies, exposing doubt as a political tool of both destabilization and control. They probe our physical and emotional relationships with everyday objects, or play with the very fabric of language. Beneath their apparent softness or subtlety, the works often leave a dissonant aftertaste—born from the gap between perception and recognition—a kind of false transparency mirrored in the materials themselves. The aim is to inhabit this fissure, to reveal the zones of friction between intimacy and mediation, and to shed light on how our emotions and gestures are harnessed by social and technological systems.

“Props” thus approaches absence as a critical experience through which our perceptions are reexamined. The works gathered in the exhibition draw attention to the fractures within the fabric of the world, exploring the threshold where the familiar gives way to the strange, and embracing the inevitability that some things will always elude us. As Didi-Huberman writes in What We See Looks Back at Us: “Let us open our eyes to feel what we do not see”—a gesture that leads us toward a more sensitive form of knowledge, an open space for reflection, for questioning what seems self-evident, and for welcoming dissent.

–Marion Coindeau