With a little over two months to go, I hope those of us who haven’t seen it yet will do their best to visit Matter of Place, Thomas J Price’s solo exhibition at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal. If you already did, be sure to consider a revisit before the exhibition closes on Sunday February 9^th and the sculptures get lifted again. Matter of Place opened on Friday October 4 and curator Shehera Grot invited me to be part of it. An honour and a pleasure. Here’s the audio-file of the piece I shared that evening. The full text is posted under the following ‘Why I really think you must visit the exhibition (again)”-notes. Here’s the audio-file:

Notes on enjoying
Since its opening, Matter of Place is an experience I revisit often. Instead of stating the number of times I’ve been, let me share some spoiler-free notes about why I enjoy returning to the space:
– Strolling among the works offers a perfect setting to have a conversation about the different ways to capture stature. Who and what ‘deserves’ to be monumentalized? Whose fiction can claim public spaces? Doing what? Where? With which materials?
– From marble to aluminium to acryl to bronze to… Matter of Place is a great space to discuss and reconsider the use and meanings of materials. It’s interesting to see how material impacts meaning.
– The same goes for the different sizes of the works. What does scale do?
– The placings of Moments Contained and All In make their part of the exhibition space a great spot to think about depth. It offers interesting considerations about distance and how to stretch or shrink it.
– Having the Man Series next to a room that is, in part, about the memory of seeing is just so clever!
– There’s a particular kind of quiet in the hall. It’s not so much a complete absence of sound but more a mindfulness of it. Of course, there’s a video where we hear Price talking about one of his works but other than that, on the moments I went, it was a rather quiet space. It didn’t have the volume-levels well-attended exhibitions normally have. It’s almost as if the sculptures, through their self-contained mannerisms, are conductors of Quiet. 

Really, please go to one of your group chats and propose going (back) to Kunsthal in the new year. Get those ticket numbers up, up, up. On Thursday April 10 I’ll be in conversation with Grot as part of the GembertheeSessies (Ginger tea sessions) at Amsterdam’s Bijlmer Parktheater. Tickets for the GembertheeSessies can be bought here. Please note: This edition our conversations will be in Dutch.


Text opening piece (Oct. 4, 2024)
“Was it ever so quiet, the room began to ask you questions?”
While trying to fit my deep appreciation for Thomas J Price’s work into this five minute chat, Amiri Baraka is one of the two artists who came to mind. In one of his lo-ku’s, his remix of the ancient Japanese haiku, Baraka asks: “Was it ever so quiet, the room began to ask you questions?”

When was one of the European cities I feel at home in, ever quiet enough to ask me something? When did their city elements that are permanent, or are associated with permanence, ever make me stop, pause and reconsider myself with a freedom so imaginatively hopeful that it feels like fiction? From Rotterdam-Zuid to Brixton, Hackney to Bijlmer, Achilles Street to Kruiskade…
And I’m not talking about the questions on posters and billboards when they try to sell us… I don’t know, subscriptions or bubble tea or fear and relaxation.

When it comes to figuring out what it means to be human, most of the spaces we live in and move through and love are built to suggest that personhood has always been and will always be a matter of fixed ideas and closed questions. With his work, Thomas J Price underlines the possibilities, strategies and space we have to crack them open. And if you’re one of those people with unlimited time and infinite energy… bless you. Must be nice. Me, I can’t relate so the reconsideration of cracking a closed question -not with more questions but through Quiet- and, not by these action-packed ways engaging with all kinds of expectations but by amplifying interiority-is a relief I didn’t know public spaces had to offer.

Recognition. With his excitingly imaginative works Thomas J Price offers recognition.
And, they grant us a kind of confidence. The kind that makes you rearrange your posture.
Yes, towards the horizon and up to the sky but also, and very much so, from the ground up as you stroll around with the unclenched shoulders and relaxed muscles of someone who no longer feels alone

With their gaze and their levels of being so deliciously self-contained, Price’s sculptures offer us the hope, and dare I say truth, that there is, indeed, a place beyond all this spectacle, beyond all these action-packed, value-driven answers to a question that so greatly informs our days: “How do we see each other?” And, as beautifully depicted in the Man Series and a painting like Momentary Interface, what are we telling through our ways of looking?

I hope everybody takes a moment to take in the poetics of the works. Take their names, for example. In these days of rushing, deadlines and all things uncomfortably speedy, marinate on what it means to recognize yourself in a work with the title Time Unfolding. Or what it means when you’re so often seen as dangerous and aggressive but now, as you’re strolling through the park, trying your very best to mind your business… and suddenly you find yourself mirrored by this almost 3 metres high salute to stillness called Witness: The Distance Within. Or, to see someone with your braids, your face, your body -who doesn’t have any zodiac or galaxy-esque references and, who isn’t often associated with the centers of our universe- but who is now called ‘Grounded in the Stars’

And, through them, here we are. In present tense, straight from the archives into the future. In the ever so calm presence of these fictionalized characters who are so deliciously unbothered that they make the distance between us and liberation feel… if not smaller, then at least more graspable.
As Sound Turns To Noise and fiction turns to access, Price’s work allows us to witness how a reclaiming of space, a remixing of materials and an amplifying of Stillness transforms belonging from a measure of power to a matter of place

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Abdullah Ibrahim live in concert. He closed his performance with an a capella version of Trance-Mission in which he questions what it means to belong if there’s nobody to welcome you. And I remembered how I felt going to Matter of Place in Krems, feeling mighty out of place in Austria. And the impact it had on me, how soothing it was, to see Reaching Out in front of their Kunsthal. Which is in line with what curator Shehera Grot talked about during the press preview. About being at an art fair and how seeing Moments Contained made her feel less alone.

Thank you, mr. Price, for blessing these space with such warm works of togetherness and for your superb mastery of techniques, and imagination, and material, and fiction, and refusal, and scale, and care.
Thank you for providing us with our very own Squad of Stillness.