Les Choses

Courtesy Droste Galladé

Les Choses. The things. But not in the sense of noumena, of things-in-themselves. The term points to the great collective mass of objects with which we, today, construct our lives; the things we hanker after, that we use to define ourselves as individuals, both socially and culturally. The things are slightly menacing, threatening to take over.

The title of Felix Kultau’s new exhibion at Droste Galladé is borrowed from Georg Perec’s 1965 novel about a young French couple whose lives are dominated by their material desires, to the extent that their fantasies about furniture and design all but paralyse their existence. Theirs is a life barely lived, a life lived through dreams, in a tale told through long and detailed descriptions of perfect apartments and the objects that fill them. We never quite grasp who they really are, because their half-baked identities never successfully flower into real personalities. They remain agents of desire, and never more than that. This loose, even faulty, connection between identity and objects is the subject of the exhibition Les Choses.