Troika: Everything Is and Isn’t at The Same Time

Galerie Huit presents the Hong Kong solo debut exhibition “Everything is and isn’t at the same time” by Troika, Eva Rucki (b.1976 Germany), Conny Freyer (b.1976 Germany), Sebastien Noel (b.1977 France), who have worked together since 2003.

Troika’s works manipulate and disrupt our experience and understanding of the world and ask the question why we know what we know, and whether such knowledge is certain.

The exhibition at Galerie Huit consists of signature two-dimensional works and sculptures made from a wide array of media including soot, dice and electricity that articulate the physical manifestations and signifiers of time. If it is true that all art has an implicit and unique temporal quality, the materiality of time is here the prime element and subject matter.

At the centre of the main gallery hangs the sculpture “The Sum of all Possibilities”, which offers a playful commentary on the nature of sculptural forms, which traditionally cannot be seen from each point of view simultaneously and can be grasped in its totality only through the act of moving around it.

“Hierophany” and “Calculating the Universe” are made through the placement of tens of thousands of black and white dice one after the other following simple repetitive algorithms. Albeit having a precise starting point (in the case of “Hierophany”, the upper half and in the central axis for “Calculating the Universe”), these works are the still-frame of a potentially boundless, infinite repetitive process that unfolds during its making-process in an unpredictable yet causal way. While time in “The Sum of all Possibilities” is an autarkic cycle, in works such as “Hierophany” and “Calculating the Universe” time is the promise of an endless journey.

Chance disrupts the cause-effect development of logical arguments and time is no longer linear but a maze, an architecture of experience in “Circular Ruin”.

Some of the pieces in the exhibition belong to a series (“Fahrenheit 451”) or their formal elements organised into sections, phrase and sequences. The art object is thus made of a series of events, where narration is substituted by a repetitive process of creation whose outcomes suggest a sort of development in stages, analogous with the phenomenon of growth.

Poised on a plinth, “Everything is and isn’t at the same time” (2015) reconciles these different phases in a sculptural form. The sculpture “Everything is and isn’t at the same time” interprets a monocular, disembodied, objective vision of the world. It questions that all can be understood completely in terms of the processes from which it is composed, and suggests that one model or view alone can never form an accurate image of the whole.

The sculpture is made of its inner simultaneity. The passing of chronological time is irrelevant, and time becomes an experiential process consisting of the perceived relationships between and within objects, events and bodies veiled in our conceptions of origin, persistence and finitude.