Memory is redundant, it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
–Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
In Juliette Lena Hager’s exhibition at Pusher Gallery, almost everything feels as if it has been created to be only peripherally sensible. That said, the three-channel film installation, Polyrhythmic composition for a pending wish (2025), certainly commands the most hypnotising qualities of the works on view. In these silver-framed screens, spiralling coins rattle endlessly down plastic funnels. The videos shift at varying speeds, jumping from screen to screen—they glow acid green, yellow, sickly blue, red, and black, sometimes filmed in such grainy close-up that the speckled flash could almost pass for streetlights on a midnight drive. Although the films are programmed to play and pause at random, I enter the room as all three screens are synchronised, the sounds of the coins spinning in perpetuity.
These found videos are of spiral coin deposits: the commodified equivalent to the wishing well. A stalwart of small-town museums and fast-food chains, they now incarnate Americana kitsch: simulacrums of their folkloric counterparts, they harness similar potentials of expectation to the wishing well yet are literally drained of their original affective power—water. Whereas the coin offering to a wishing well is an entreaty to the deity or magical guardian it may house, the spiral deposit abstracts and inverts this relationship, turning the wish-maker into a performer of ritualised philanthropy. Desire, now neatly folded into the logic of capital, is sanctioned and fragmented into a momentary spectacle of circulation.
Rhythmanalysis, the exhibition’s title, is taken from French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s 1992 posthumously published collection of essays of the same name (subtitled Space, Time and Everyday Life). Lefebvre’s text, which builds upon his previous work, The Production of Space (1974), is, like most of his output, an examination of the question of everyday life, or the quotidian—the realm of habitual actions, unnoticed routines, and deeply ingrained social structures. In its original French, quotidien is a pun, referring both to what is mundane and repetitive, what are both habitually overlooked aspects and deeply embedded structures of everyday life. Emerging as a distinctly modern phenomena during the nineteenth century, the everyday is described dialectically as a space in which illusion and reality, power and powerlessness constantly intersect. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis thus examines how biological, natural rhythms—memory, heartbeat, circadian and menstrual cycles—collide with socially enforced, unnatural rhythms—calendars, traffic lights, the six o’clock news. These rhythms not only structure life but also become a method of analysis, revealing the hidden patterns of experience; Hager’s title plays on this duality, positioning either the artist or the viewer as the analyst, or, in Lefebvre’s terminology, the ‘measure.’
Lefebrve geometrically describes the concepts of biological and social timescales as, respectively, cyclical and linear. This finds its formal expression in Hager’s works as circles and lines, which are ubiquitous throughout. In Lefebrve’s formulation, “cyclical repetition and the linear repetitive separate out under analysis, but in reality interfere with one another constantly” (1). This interplay between cyclical and linear rhythms is reflected in Untitled (2025), a horizontal two-toned wooden device punctuated with metal pins upon which red and green felt rings—reminiscent of the segments of a roulette wheel—irregularly hang. The chromatic division of form suggests separation, yet what emerges is not a collection of separate entities but a unified whole. Just as in Lefebvre’s theory, form in this artwork highlights how seemingly separate temporal structures merge into a single, lived experience. The artist has manipulated colour and shape to produce a visually harmonised object, an impression that gains further resonance when one learns that the work was, in fact, an interior section of a piano.
More corporately banal is the tiled carpet that floors Polyrhythmic composition. Resembling those found in cheap hotels, casinos, or otherwise strip-lit, atemporal urban spaces, this greying carpet is patterned with strings of circles in colours that mirror those in the videos above them. Describing to me her daily habit of aimless travel across the city by foot, bicycle, and bus, Hager’s exploration of cartography in her work—which this carpet is an example of—takes on a personal and embodied quality. The evolution of global cartography, which has made aesthetic solutions to the issues of projecting three dimensions onto a flat plane, is closely linked to, and has often been the engine of, colonial expansion. Maps are therefore one of the most totalising examples of the production of space and time. While the event of travelling from one point to another involves a world of observation and sensation unique to the perspective of the traveller, mapping abstracts and flattens this phenomenological experience. Among the aesthetic solutions developed to overcome the issues of projection is Tissott’s indicatrix: small circles placed on maps, resulting in ellipses that describe distortion at a single point. It is these that Hager recalls in the carpet’s painted circles, just as the carpet’s squares recall the tiling of web maps—the partitioned rendering necessitated by computing power and expectations of user experience.
If the carpet enacts an unfolding, or flattening, of space and movement, then Untitled (diagrams for Polyrhthmic composition for a pending wish) (2025), describes an understanding of space and time that centres the subject’s (let’s say, in this case, the coin’s) experience. It is a yellowing plastic tube, almost a meter in length, internally printed with more strings of circles in various colours. These, Hager explains, are dynamic maps of the coins from the videos. She has digitally rendered their trajectories by pausing the videos, frame by frame, and plotting their position. Transformed by analysis, these previously flickering, incomprehensible audiovisual phenomena are ossified within the cylinder. According to David Harvey’s neo-Marxist notion of time-space compression, technological innovations have condensed or even elided spatial and temporal distances, commodifying and homogenising space as a conduit for capital and movement (2). Few will recognise the elaborately technical processes behind Hager’s Untitled; indeed, few reflect upon the invisible infrastructures that govern the transmission of a text or the flight of an aircraft. But Hager’s unassuming work materialises the very limited consciousness with which we navigate a world that has been compressed, its fluid contingencies flattened into abstraction.
Despite their often industrial and digital finishes, Hager’s works build upon referents that are explicitly ancient, medieval, early modern, or rural, and pastoral. Take a recent work included at In Contiguity at Sherbert Green, London, for example. Study for choreographies (2024) used vinyl tape to mimic the floor markings found in playgrounds, building sites, and gyms, entangling their directional commands with the unspoken rules of navigating the white cube.
This work arose from the artist’s research into choreomania, and particularly the social phenomenon known as the ‘dancing plague,’ occurring in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like her reference to wishing wells, Hager’s recourse to the histories, practices, and aesthetics of early-modern Europe to illuminate contemporary structures of power (that indeed found their genesis in the very same period) feels significant. If, as Lefebvre explains, space as it is produced and abstracted under capitalism is referential; “abstract space finds objective expression in derivative ways” (3)—then Hager produces her interventions by utilising the same framework.
Another way Hager uses the recursive mode, although to different effect, is via the kitsch. We can’t truly go back in time; but kitsch objects, like the spiral coin wells, like the scent of Fabuloso Lavender—an American cleaning product—sprayed within the exhibition space, intensify the illusion that we can. This illusion makes life feel more comfortable but also prevents us from facing existential truths, depriving us of a tragic consciousness. By blending memory, imagination, and reality, kitsch offers the comfort of reversal or an emotional escape from time. Trapped in this illusion, we are unable to confront the truth of our present condition, the world around us, death, and suffering. Instead, kitsch and consumer culture distract us with objects and rituals that make everyday life feel safe, structured, and predictable. Seen from this view, Polyrhythmic composition, with its ever-spinning, unresolved coins, reflects our stasis, the malaise in which we wander through streets, perpetuating social rhythms that remove us from biological necessity.
(1) Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 8.
(2) Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
(3) Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 49.
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Juliette Lena Hager (b. 1998, France) lives and works in London.
Alycia Gaunt is a writer based in London.
