To be contained is to be formed in relation to an edge: a threshold that marks what is held in and what is kept out. But containment rarely holds – it fatigues, often slowly; not always through spectacle, but through accumulation. Contour Fatigue brings together nine artists whose work turns toward these sites where containment falters. Through sculpture, installation, painting and video, alongside historic drawings by Japanese fetish artist Namio Harukawa, the exhibition explores how life can exceed the forms devised to hold it. Rather than rupture, we experience oversaturation: a surface too full to reflect, say, or a rhythm too worn to signify. Drift, deformation—where matter slides away from its form and begins to pool elsewhere.
When it is successful, containment can lend form, transforming one object into a carrier for something else. Where it fails, it becomes entrapment, giving way to an affective range of violence, disappointment, misrepresentation. In Namio Harukawa's drawings of domination, the act of containment is not violent. Rather, it is a gesture of devotional enclosure, in which the self is not broken but reconfigured. Male bodies disappear beneath thighs and bottoms, immobilised by the weight and flesh of Harukawa’s seated women, vast and impassive. These smaller men become furniture: no longer self-contained, they are transformed into surface and support; folded into the architecture of the scene. Each seated pose becomes a configuration of containment as fetish: a loss of self under the pressure of another.
For Georges Bataille, it is moments of reconfiguration such as this that give rise to eroticism. The Bataillean understanding of the erotic emerges not from outside containment, but within it, as the internal pressure through which an edge begins to disintegrate or transgress. It is not a question of pleasure, but of proximity - to excess, to uncertainty, to the undoing of form. Where the self is relinquished, even momentarily, boundaries loosen and the body moves into continuity with something beyond itself, merging with the world. The other works in the exhibition, too, stay close to this pressure, to the threshold where structure grows porous and something formless, intimate, or obscure begins to take shape.
In Alessandra Spranzi’s Ogni mattina (2006), a woman waves from her balcony each morning to an unseen recipient. The gesture, held within the frame and returned to each day, appears unchanged but slowly accrues difference, a steady insistence that reflects Spranzi’s ongoing interest in how repetition can both preserve and unsettle the rituals of daily life. Containment here is temporal: an accumulation of moments that don’t resolve. The artist’s wider practice often involves rephotographing, reprinting, and rearranging found images until they become something else, not clarified, but estranged from their use. In Ogni mattina, this approach takes the form of a quiet, sustained attention to a solitary gesture — one that marks the distance between subjects, even as it insists on connection.
Jonathan Okoronkwo’s paintings stage containment as both substance and struggle. His large-scale compositions, constructed through digital fragmentation and physical layering, translate the disassembled and repurposed nature of the scrapyards he draws from - a site of breakdown and excess. The use of motor oil as pigment literalises the impossibility of containment; an unstable, staining, seeping substance that refuses fixity. The resulting works stage fragments of mechanical life held momentarily in order—yet always shadowed by the entropy from which they emerge. These are not static representations but imprints of repair and decay, where the very material of the painting carries the residue of what once functioned. Containment here is always partial — an ongoing negotiation between absorption and resistance. What leaks is not only matter but memory: of labour and of extraction. Works that undo themselves in their own making, like light that annihilates the star it leaves behind.
Where these artists hold matter in suspension, Jasper Marsalis and Margarete Raspé take up the threshold of vision. Marsalis’s Face series abstracts the facial field through mirrored surfaces — soldered metal, disco tiles, foil — constructing works that scatter recognition. The face is not depicted but dispersed: reduced to flicker and fragmentation, where light strikes and fractures. Across his practice, Marsalis draws out the tension between looking and being looked at, between subjecthood and spectacle. The face becomes both screen and stage: a surface that reflects the viewer back at themselves, but only in fragments — pixelated, deformed, delayed. Containment here is optical; the frame holds, but the surface resists legibility, dispersing what it captures.
Margaret Raspé’s Fernsehfrühstück (1994/2023) presents four portable televisions arranged around a dining table, each screen partially obscured by a honeycomb grid. The image remains visible but never legible— broadcast content diffused into light and motion without resolution. The work reflects Raspé’s enduring effort to unsettle automated perception and reorient attention, often using domestic tools and repetitive processes to reveal the structures of everyday life within an increasingly technologised world. Her approach is grounded in a belief that perception, consciousness, and ecological entanglement are inseparable. In Fernsehfrühstück, containment is rendered a visual condition, neither total nor fixed, enacted through a filter that withholds resolution while sustaining presence. What is held is not the image itself but its delay: a softened insistence that resists immediate consumption and invites a different kind of attention.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane’s diptych Job Lot (late 1700s/2024) and Silver Service (1774/2024) draws out the politics of inheritance through the material residue of two English lineages. First presented in their joint exhibition Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island in 2024 – their first collaborative project, though each maintains a distinctive practice – the work examines how inherited objects hold and transmit histories of class, identity and value.
In Job Lot, 240 porcelain chamber pots, inherited by Graham Randles from his pub-owning parents in Liverpool, are stacked in precarious excess, recalling their former place suspended from a pub ceiling. Silver Service comprises Sir William Bellingham’s 250-year-old collection of George III silverware, long stored in vaults and heavy trunks. Installed in separate rooms of The Clerk’s House — the chamber pots in what would have been the bedroom, the silver in the downstairs showroom —the diptych plays out the architectures of class and legacy: what is lived with and what is put on display. Containment here is physical, symbolic, and psychic; bound up in domestic rituals, classed histories, and systems of preservation that both stabilise and constrain. Set to be auctioned this year, the diptych is further reframed through the logic of consumption, where vessels of both waste and refinement return to circulation.
Two untitled works by Michael E. Smith consist of brass cymbals, lightly marked with beads, spraypaint and plastic occlusions. The objects remain recognisable, yet their material state is subtly unsettled. As in much of the artist’s work, meaning emerges through a shift in register, from the familiar to the slightly estranged, where function is neither restored nor revoked, but held in tension. Containment here is interior and unresolved: not a sealing-in, but a holding together of fragile associations — sonic, bodily, cultural — just before they dissipate.
Adriano Costa’s practice attends to the inherent value of all matter, repositioning discarded or overlooked materials through acts of care and devotion. In AC 22 (2022), a pack of folded black garbage bags — the label “saco de lixo” still visible — is sealed in clear acrylic. The phrase translates simply as trash bag but what is held or implied is less literal. The dense opaque form almost entirely fills the space, turning containers of waste into something contained themselves. Costa has described this fullness as a kind of metaphor – not only for waste, but for all that escapes easy naming. He recalls a scene from Beckett’s Happy Days, in which a woman buried to her neck in sand continues reaching for a toothbrush. It is a state of near-total enclosure, yet routine persists. That paradox holds in AC 22: the black mass feels both banal and bottomless. A container within a container, it speaks not only to utility but to absurdity and a refusal to discard.
With thanks to Modern Art, London; Galerie Molitor, Berlin; P420, Bologna; and Gallery 1957, Accra.
