Thoughts in No Particular Order, Given the Circumstances at Kunstverein Kevin, Vienna

Thoughts in No Particular Order, Given the Circumstances, a group exhibition with Clémentine Adou, Anna Budniewski, Mara Jenny, Troy Montes-Michie, Kofi Møller, and Ceidra Moon Murphy, takes its title from a chapter in Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers – a diaristic, fragmentary text in which thought proceeds associatively, resistant to the organising pressures of argument or conclusion. The chapter was shared with each participating artist not as a thematic directive but as a shared material: something each was invited to read according to their own practice, to engage selectively, to misread, redirect, or resist. What each work makes of the text – whether it is absorbed, deflected, or left largely untouched – remains as open as the reading itself; Guattari’s writing functions not as a frame that determines meaning in advance, but as a surface across which individual interpretive decisions become legible.

It is within this investment in the indeterminate that Guattari’s distinction between Chronos – the measured time of logistics, institutional infrastructures, the reduction of practice to the calculable – and Aion, the open, non-linear time of making and of decisions that cannot be fully prescribed in advance, becomes structuring for the exhibition. The exhibition does not resolve this tension so much as inhabit it – testing whether the measured and the open might coexist within the same object, the same gesture, the same space.

Developed through conversations around the history of Kunstverein Kevin and its former function as a furniture storage space for an antique shop located in Vienna’s first district, the exhibition takes as its material premise a simple constraint: each invited artist was given an empty cardboard box, and the completed work must fit inside it for delivery to and from the exhibition space. The box operates simultaneously as a circumstance of production, a means of transport, and an element of display – its role in relation to the work left open for each artist to determine. Between the box’s arrival empty and its return full, or otherwise transformed, constraint and possibility are tested here as co-constitutive rather than opposed – a question of whether limits might open rather than foreclose.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by SoiL Thornton.