Setting as in arrangement, as in a specific context, as an amalgam of things. Objects are plucked from the world and situationalized on alternate planes. This happens like a kairological event; suddenly a chronological, rather stable element is seized and activated. A thing bursts out of the continuum, now folded into new relational orders. Continuity yields to adjacency, and meaning is produced through placement. As such, processes of selection and reorganization form a point of connection among the artists present here.

Collection, pedagogy, and circulation are the bedrocks of Jef Geys’s project. Ranging frequencies, from literature and didactic materials to mass media imagery filter into a pliant historical record. It follows that his precise archival methods are not merely relegated to retrospection, but can instead be mobilized toward an ongoing present and the projection of tomorrow. In this sense, Geys’s practice is predicated on anticipatory cataloguing and open informational systems.

Geys positions himself as an editor of material, rather than a singular authorial figure. His practice instead disperses authorship across networks of arrangement, citation, and reuse. The works in Setting unfold as a tripartite - the connective thread being Piet Mondrian’s rigorous structural abstractions, as well as his uses of black, white, and primary colors. Tribute to Chris Kraus with Mondrian colors connects Geys’s 1960s grid works to contemporary literature, with Kraus’s I Love Dick as a key reference point. A corresponding “sister work,” consisting of a list of names from the book, is held in the Flemish Government Collection, which tethers the pieces to an institutional complex.

Diverging from Geys’s pedagogically-oriented practice, Jacqueline Fraser expresses a less systematic approach. She’s willing to digress from cinematic reference to formal intuition, her image and material conglomerates emerge from improvisational acts of extraction and reassembly. For the “Making of” series, each body of work is derived from a specific film; previous references include Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Fraser largely ejects the characters from their respective plotlines, shifting emphasis to an overall mood of her design. Through collage the artist further disrupts origins by recasting people, places, and things in layered assemblages. She exercises no deference to a particular rung of culture, instead subsumming diverse semiotic strata into the mix. Pulling from fashion, art, interior design, textiles, and lifestyle magazines, Fraser builds composite figures cast in plotless realms.

These new works, in turn, extend this logic of cinematic extraction and formal recomposition as she revisits the figure of Maria Callas, who featured prominently in the artist’s 2020-21 Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition. The earlier iteration took shape around Tom Volf’s 2017 documentary, while “The Making of Maria 2026” pieces are spun from Pablo Larraín’s 2024 biopic starring Angelina Jolie. The installation of ceiling-to-floor tinsel also presents an exercise in scenography, enabling Fraser to construct an open theatrical environment.

Working in a compatible mode of arrangement, Hélène Fauquet draws upon different degrees of fact and fiction. In one such work titled Flower composition photographs interpreting the theme of Mordor, Lothlórien and the Shire the artist distributes a set of heterogenously-framed botanical photographs across a simple, cool-toned table. The image containers themselves refer to mass-produced decorative objects, as standardized ornaments and embellishments decorate their surfaces. The total ensemble is linked specifically to the three titular regions from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Accordingly, Fauquet wanders around these mythic territories, spinning imagined geographies into the real, in line with the format of her other “pictorial essays.” Multiplicity, coordination, and variation are just a few of the work’s plotpoints, ultimately yielding a perspectival indeterminacy.

Hanging elsewhere a cluster of mussel shells spills out of a bejeweled container. These allied skeletons, bereft of their former inhabitants, are caught in a tangled accumulation. Both works speak to threads central to the artist’s larger oeuvre, as objectively oriented display systems meet improvisational editing techniques that are in constant negotiation of order and its opposite.

Emeline Depas is a perpetual scavenger of artifacts, especially those that refer–or may be leveraged–to sonic ends. Her multiplicious attitude sets the work at a remove from dogma, instead the artist centers forms of assembly that evade closed ideological loops. Here, a wooden structure stands like a monolith, its interior holding a matrix of sound-producing metals. Depas thoroughly examines the potential of these found materials, their capacities and limitations, before arriving at any resolution. As such, her amalgamation stands as another exercise in breaking objects from origins and re-choreographing their relations.

Each work thus proceeds by plucking forms from circulation then re-scripting their terms. This operation is never consigned to an overt closure or moralistic track, but a diversion into alternate lines of connection.

— Reilly Davidson