Held
25.9.26 - 24.10.26
Love is so much more fatal than I had thought, love is as inherent as wanting itself, and we are guaranteed by a necessity that shall renew itself continuously. Love already is, it is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce, which is called passion.
- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Silence is the starting point for Nadia Gueddouh's work, and in the exhibition Held she explores silence as both an artistic and existential practice. Here, the painting is not created through will or intention, but arises in an open and attentive space, as a form of wordless prayer.
In her practice, Gueddouh leans on the cave paintings and the bodily and instinctive that must have been present in their making. What made people move down into the caves and defy the dangerous passages and the impenetrable darkness? There must have been a driving force present, one that was not anchored in language, message or conceptual explanation, but that was about expressing oneself and connecting with something larger, some underlying currents that were not determined by time and space. In a similar way, Gueddouh tries, through painting, to come into contact with something wordless, flowing and bodily. In her works she is less interested in motif and composition and more in the material and the movement that arises in the meeting between body and canvas. She describes her own work as more closely related to dance than to observing.
Held circles around staying in something. To hold on, to hold close, to hold back, or simply to hold oneself open. In this sense, silence does not become an absence, but a space one can stay in. A place where something can be allowed to arise without first having to be defined.
- Excerpt from exhibition text
Photo: Kevin Josias