The group exhibition (Slow Shutter Speed, Long Exposures) is built around the first artistic encounters between Sarah Smolders and the artists Rabten Tenzin, Anna van Bommel, Rik Van Gorp, and Jiyoung Chu. In addition to the work from those initial encounters, they were invited to develop new creations for the spaces at Out of Sight.

The choice to facilitate new work was a natural one for Smolders. It will come as no surprise to some that the practices of the invited artists often seek out points of tension or touch upon liminal zones—such as time, scale, space, repetition, labour, or question limits of the body.

For this exhibition, Smolders also developed a new work, "Notes on Places". For them, this series functions as a visual—non-verbal—exhibition text, complementing the exhibition and offering a literal point of reference to navigate through it.

Our first contact;

I remember my first encounter with the painting that moved against gravity without pretence. The subtly creaking sound of the thin plastic, tied up to trap air, announced the barely visible erosion of the mountainside—built up out of paint.

I think back to when the slightly musty air of the often too noisy gathering space became saturated with the scent of resin and mint, allowing me, in thought, together with the two still-unknown figures in the palm of her hand, to escape the space into a pine forest bordering the edge of a lake on an overly sultry summer evening in Lille.

Or when, as part of a circle of eyes, my gaze was directed at the ground, into a block of wood, where I thought I could read the dermatoglyphs of a folded index finger in the wood’s growth rings. Then, the palm of two hands—carefully touching each other in the depth of the massive block—revealed themselves. They held a generous, empty space, which shortly after was filled with rice from a nearby sack.

Finally, I remember a row of monochrome paintings that, leaning on seemingly casually chosen wooden blocks of different types and sizes, attempted to disappear into the seam between floor and wall. A tension—in a margin—that I later noticed again in the folds of a precisely folded cotton shirt that seemed to almost multiply into a stack.

(Slow Shutter Speed, Long Exposures) is an invitation to take the time to encounter the works for the first time—or once again—so that they may later resonate and be remembered in other spaces.

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Supported by: Flanders — State of the Art
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Image: "Val 13, Rotterdam" (2025), Anna van Bommel

Artists: Anna van Bommel, Rik Van Gorp, Jiyoung Chu, Sarah Smolders, Rabten Tenzin