29/11/2024 – 23/02/2025,

Hyle¹: Nina Beier, Formafantasma, Pauline Julier, Izidora I LETHE, Ceylan Öztrük, Gina Proenza

, Kunsthalle Bielefeld

What materials form the inventory of our collective and individual histories? And how do these materials shape our collective futures? Developed by the curators Kristina Grigorjeva and Undine Rietz, the exhibition Hyle¹ in the foyer of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld examines the connection between temporality and material – with contributions by Nina Beier, Formafantasma, Pauline Julier, Izidora I LETHE, Ceylan Öztrük and Gina Proenza.

In ancient Greek, Hyle¹ stands for wood in the sense of a raw material, for the material, the primordial substance, which in Aristotelian physics describes the set destination of malleable matter that takes shape through human labour.

Materials embody power, social order and cultural symbolism; they are not just objects, but part of a network of meanings, practices and social relationships, as the Bielefeld historian Reinhart Koselleck also observes in his paradigm of ‘layers of time’. He used the idea of geological phenomena as a spatial metaphor. Depending on their application, they not only represent a physical experience, but also have a significant influence on societal and social behaviour. Like geological layers, they thus create a construct that we can read as culture.

How can we project our multi-layered past into a possible future? And how can we avoid using ‘the tools of our masters’, as Audre Lorde would have it, in our collective and individual futures?

Hyle has been developed by the two curators Kristina Grigorjeva and Undine Rietz as a two-part exhibition dedicated to these questions at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, from 29 November 2024, and the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, from 28 March 2025.