NOT I: Opening Friday, 9 January 2026, 6 – 8 pm

The works in this exhibition approach the act of recall as something unstable, focusing on the ways in which ghostly images surface unevenly. Memory’s return is involuntary and comes as a storm breaking over consciousness. The fractured nature of Beckett’s monologue mirrors the timelessness of trauma. One may attempt to create distance from the event by refusing the self, yet cannot stop reliving it. Mouth's obsessive refusal of the “I” is the hallmark of traumatic disavowal. It is a desperate attempt to keep unbearable experience at arm’s length. The monologue’s structure, with eruptions of sensory fragments, mirrors the intrusive logic of traumatic memory, in which recollection is experienced through involuntary flashes.

The exhibition offers a more accommodating counterpoint, in which memory’s fragments are allowed to surface. Gina Folly’s works, which enclose mummified flowers within cardboard packaging materials, make this dynamic tangible, with fragile organic remnants functioning as tender residues of experience held in suspension, quietly insisting, much like memory itself, on its right to remain. Urban Zellweger’s paintings transform familiar pizza boxes into blurred landscapes that echo the distortions of memory over time. By partially obscuring their printed designs beneath layers of paint, Zellweger creates ghostly scenes that operate like places half-remembered, which return in uncertain form. Similarly, William Gaucher’s compositions can be seen as accumulations of painterly gestures, where faint traces of art-historical memory and subconscious association surface through layered marks. His canvases assemble residues of past images and methods into a syntax that feels familiar, echoing Beckett’s approach in which meaning emerges through the build-up of repetitions and hesitant returns.

Trauma always insists, even if the self refuses to claim it. The result is a voice caught between confession and flight, compelled to articulate what it cannot acknowledge as its own, trauma speaking through a subject who can survive it only by saying, again and again, not I. This dynamic, where overwhelming experience returns as relentless recurrence, finds a powerful counterpoint in Hanne Darboven’s Hommage an meinen Vater (1988), which approaches memory through accumulation, repetition and duration. Hand-inscribed sheets transform personal loss into a monumental system of notation, where grief is methodically repeated until it becomes a defined, visible structure.

In Not I, the voice is severed from the body, speaking without pause or control, an articulation driven less by intention than by compulsion. This sense of being overtaken, of speaking before understanding, finds resonance in the works here, where forms and narratives seem to emerge from places, where the past insists. It transforms what in Beckett appears as crisis into an act of recognition, opening room for the past to return in unruly shapes. Martin Kippenberger’s installation Jetzt geh ich in den Birkenwald, denn meine Pillen wirken bald, with its distorted birch trunks and scattered pills, stages a forest as a site of psychological disorientation, where perception buckles and repetition becomes a form of inner echo, recalling the jagged rhythms and looping refusals of Beckett’s monologue.

The disavowal of the “I” can be read as a violent existential dilemma, which becomes the crisis of a body and mind fractured into a single organ and voice expelled from self-ownership. Daria Blum’s photographic prints reflect this same instability, depicting selves that appear doubled or refracted. Xie Lei’s painting, with its two spectral figures dissolving into one another, echoes the exhibition’s recurring sense of selves drifting, overlapping, and becoming indistinct in the unstable currents of memory. Mike Kelley’s Trauma Images bear a cartoon-like innocence, coupled with violent imagery and unsettling, nightmarish tension. They evoke memories that cannot be fully repressed, lingering instead as unresolved psychic residues. Monika Sosnowska’s Ghosts, winding metal armatures that resemble a human body, appear in the space as distorted figures, like the remnants of gestures or movements long since withdrawn, architectural phantoms whose bent forms echo the show’s preoccupation with memory as something strained and fragmented. Ilaria Vinci’s paintings, structured as onions with their concentric skins concealing an inner maze, deepen this reflection on how memory unfolds. They suggest an interiority that can only be approached through gradual peeling. 

The slow boundless whirlwind of wandering thought becomes a cascade of involuntary memory. The works trace different paths through the unstable terrain of recollection, each offering a material analogue to the fractured inner landscape Beckett renders through a solitary voice.

Tomass Aleksandrs