Ryan Gander at Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

As you enter this exhibition, isn’t it clear? You are the visitor, this is the exhibition space, and the things you see are the artworks.

There are distinct and separate entities: you, the space, the objects in it. But are they really separate?

Ryan Gander’s One Hundred Things Twice unfolds as an inventory of possible realities: things that can be thought multiple times.

Developed for the annual program CAPTCHA Realism at Salzburger Kunstverein, the exhibition unfolds through pairs, echoes, near-matches and slight misalignments.

Classical logic tells us that everything must either be or not be.1 A body is here, or it is there. A statement is true, or it is false. Yet Gander’s practice has long been invested in precisely those situations in which such certainty begins to fail. His works often operate in the brief delay before meaning settles. They ask what happens when the thing refuses to be exhausted by one description.

In quantum theory, an object can technically exist in more than one state at once.2 Something similar happens in One Hundred Things Twice. A thing twice is not a copy. It may be an echo, a ghost, a front and a back, a left and a right, a beginning and an end. One thing happened; another almost did. One thing sits before you; another version of it begins to form in memory. The exhibition is thus less a collection of stable things than a field of relations between them.

The title of the show suggests enumeration, perhaps even the logic of a database: one hundred things ordered and counted. But a hundred things are never just a hundred things. Each object enters into relation with all the others; meaning does not belong to the object alone, nor to the artist, nor to the viewer. It circulates between them. It behaves like a guest that becomes a host, or a host who suddenly discovers they are no longer fully at home.