Props

“Props” approaches absence as a critical and deeply sensitive experience through which our everyday perceptions are re-examined. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s notion of the eerie—a feeling that emerges when presence and absence falter—the exhibition brings together works that explore the fractures in the fabric of the world, where the familiar slips into the uncanny.

Moving beyond humour or melancholy, the artists use this unsettling quality to expose the forces of domination and the structures shaping daily life. Social hierarchies are unveiled and disrupted, doubt is revealed as both a political instrument and a destabilising force, and language itself becomes a material to be unpicked and reassembled. Absence, rather than being a simple void, is treated as a charged state of resonance—what is named slips away, becoming something felt in the interplay of light, space, and material.

The works’ tactile and haptic qualities foster interaction and intimacy, both between viewer and medium and across the media themselves. “Props” suggests both deceptive objects and support structures—things that are not, not yet, or not supposed to be. This duality generates a dynamic space of playfulness and disquiet, a poetic tension where what seems to vanish instead becomes vividly perceptible.

Derouillon presents this exhibition in October 2025, curated by Marion Coindeau, and featuring new productions alongside historical works by Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, and Kirill Savchenkov.