The exhibition with works by Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart and Silke Otto-Knapp is built around repeated absences. Each work poses the question of the representation of absence, in the subject matter itself as well as on a more personal level in relation to Lockhart’s art and life.

Lockhart’s work grows from time spent with and around others, and the mutual fondness and respect that follows in its wake. Kelley and Otto-Knapp did not enter her life as participants in her photographic or filmic work, but shaped her practice all the same.

Kelley was one of Lockhart’s mentors at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in the early 1990s, and continued to support her work long after she graduated. His Yarn #5 (1990) is part of a series of floor-based blankets upon which black or white yarn composes seemingly haphazard designs. The yarn’s doodles elicit memories of Jackson Pollock, unconscious drawings or leftovers of a child’s games.

Lockhart’s Milena (2020) pays homage to its namesake, whom the artist met in 2009 during production of her film Podwórka (2009) in Łódź, Poland. While absent from the film itself, the then-nine-year-old girl instinctively became an instrumental presence during the shooting, and went on to form a lasting bond with Lockhart. In this photographic tribute, a bouquet of chrysanthemums and hanging heliconia, arranged in accordance with the tenets of Sogetsu Ikebana, is pictured in a vase crafted from ash and dirt, forming a concise, celebratory eulogy.

Lockhart and Otto-Knapp forged a close friendship that began in the early 2000s. The latter’s Seascape (A story of a woman who, 1973) (2016) alludes to Yvonne Rainer’s This is the story of a woman who..., a staged multi-media work performed at the Theater for the New City in 1973. Rainer’s work dramatized a couple’s break-up through sound, performance, projected images — a distant model for the silhouettes in Otto-Knapp’s painting.

The exhibition coincides with the exhibition Chantal Akerman: Travelling at BOZAR, Brussels (14/03– 21/07/24). The publication accompanying this retrospective includes a newly commissioned essay by Sharon Lockhart on Akerman.