The Last Terminal: Reflections on the Coming Apocalypse (Volume 3, Part 6: Colonotopia*) at Rib, Rotterdam

Lisa Ivory (2024–2025)

Paintings

Lisa Ivory’s paintings point to an evolving story with a seemingly clear narrative arc yet the stories do not easily yield to identifications and sympathies. They undermine our certainties about where we are in relation to what we are looking at. They lead one into a painterly universe; a shadow world, a natural habitat for nudes, skeletons, and domesticated monsters.

In Part 1: Beating Death With His Own Arm, we presented two paintings titled Tourist In Your Town and Love And Communication.

In Part 2: Errors, we presented three new paintings titled Foal Phantom, Hard Times, Call It Something Nice.

In Part 3: The Recipient, we presented What The Goat Saw, Outside Love, A Summer Evening.

In Part 4: Dormitorium, we presented What the Horse Saw, Upper Hand, and Cross Bones Style.

In Part 6: Colonotopia, we present Found and Lost, Jack of All Trades, Rough Justice and Beating Death With His Own Arm.

gerlach en koop (2024–)

Om acht uur?

Dan word ik wakker.

As soon as the grip of darkness slackens, the boundaries between you and the objects around you lose their fluidity. Gradually they start to distinguish themselves, moving away from you, from the walls, from the floor, the ceiling. And you are moving away from them. Mutual sympathy turns into differentiation: the headphones onthe couch with the cord in an elegant curl on the floor; the scissors on the desk, not closed but in the shape of an x; the chair that has not been drawn up; the black-and-white postcard stuck on the wall with Blu Tack; the glass of water without water on the small metal table mobiltecnica torino next to the bed; the shoes side by side close to the leg of the table.

You’re washed ashore. You leave behind a stagnant surf of crumpled bed sheets as your feet touch the floor. You open the bedroom door. No longer asleep, but awake? Not quite.

Was machen Sie um zwei? Ich Schlafe. was an exhibition at the GAK, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen in 2020. Four years later in Rib gerlach en koop accepted the invitation by Maziar Afrassiabi to restage their attempt to approach the elusive phenomenon that is sleep by displaying works by other artists. Works that either corresponded to the disintegration of falling asleep or the reintegration of waking up. What was stretched out in space in Bremen was stretched out in time in Rotterdam. Four small gatherings of works, on display for a couple of months each time, trying to find a position that worked before, trying to merge with the original, like an insomniac.

During the night of 8th March Rib was exceptionally open until the next morning. After this good night’s wake, the last stage in the restaging has arrived. All works on display are associated in different ways to the sometimes strange, sometimes frightful, experience of waking up. Frightful? Sure, we’ve all done it many many times in our life. However, just one oblivious moment is needed, one moment of doubt – do I know how to? – and sleep stays, until you die.

Find the exhibition text (pdf) for Om acht uur? Dan word ik wakker. by gerlach en koop and Lisa Ivory Paintings here.

https://www.ribrib.nl/downloads/Rib_exhibition_handout_2025_Vol3_Part6.pdf

* Colonotopia is a marriage between colonoscopy and utopia. A medically intrusive procedure and a philosophical wreck. Dissecting it further, it’s a cross fertilization of several key operative concepts: that of colonial histories, scopic regimes and ruins.