STEADYSTATE is a group exhibition of international artists. Underpinning its curatorial framework is the Steady-State Theory of the expanding universe—once a principal cosmological model, later displaced by the Big Bang theory. This model proposed a universe in equilibrium, continuously generating matter without a defined origin or rupture. Though scientifically contested, it endures as a speculative framework, informing discourse across economics, engineering, ecology, physiology and wellbeing, media, and urban planning. On this occasion, it offers a structure through which to articulate an artistic understanding responsive to shifting conditions of labour, authorship, production, and mediation.
The artworks exhibited in STEADYSTATE present an ontology of conceptual and material gestures shaped by shared methodologies and distortion through repetition, accumulation, decay, and deconstruction, unfolding through deferred, irregular, or intensive interactions. They exist within an open-ended paradigm that rejects singular assertions and fixed conclusions, mapping evolving forms of resistance that engage with their surroundings and interrogate prescribed conventions of dissemination and documentation. The works employ a logic that navigates inert and moving images to create shifting associations—fractured, distorted, and reconfigured—extending their initial rationale through the ingestion of oblique references and autonomous interventions. Material stutters and echoes, shifting between stability and breakdown, revealing the infrastructural conditions of its making, where rhythm and context shape both form and meaning— responsive to contingent structures of interpretation.
– Matt Williams
Organised by Neue Alte Brücke, Matt Williams and ZERO...
