Written without ever using the letter ‘e’, La Disparition [A Void, 1969] is a novel in which Georges Perec attempts to give a form to absence by subtracting from the text the element that the narrator, the characters and the puzzled readers are unknowingly after. Throughout the book, the missing element is everywhere: in the oddness of language, in the discomforting way of reading, in the detective storyline – all locked up in the loop of the ‘e’, shaped as ‘a sort of parabola, not fully confocal in form and fanning out into a horizontal dash’.1

The paradoxical idea that absence may be the sharpest manifestation of presence is at the heart of not before it has forgotten you, a group exhibition featuring works by Clémentine Bruno (1994, FR), Mara Fortunatović (1987, FR), Eva Gold (1994, UK), and Bella Riza (1987, UK). Considering the ways in which regimes of visibility operate, the exhibition explores the tenuous shift from being perceived to not being perceived, conjuring the forms of affective engagement that we develop with what has left, as well as with what is left of what has left – these hollow tracks and concave masks cast by what has disappeared.

After a first iteration at The Pole Gallery in Paris (Mar–Apr 2022) – an outdoor display of single artworks on a street pole in Le Marais, where this genuine piece of urban furniture, witnessing the permanency of urban fluxes, operated as a testimony to the impossibility to fixate change – not before it has forgotten you is travelling to NıCOLETTı, London, where it presents commissioned and existing artworks by the four artists.

In a new body of work comprising posters made in collaboration with Anna Clegg and Beatrice Vorster, as well as a painting, Clémentine Bruno questions the notions of appropriation, absorption and continuation of past forms, approaching complex realities through the interweaving of past and present, fact and fiction.

The backbone reference of Bruno’s series of work is The Adoration of the Name of Jesus by El Greco (1570): devised as haunted collage, these works operate as metaphorical reinterpretations that explore the processes whereby difference and change can emerge from repetition. Seeking to bring forth what is hidden, the resulting artworks are slippery objects that break down strict definitions while excavating subtexts: as an offshoot of the painting, the posters turn the singular into the multiple and put at stake the question of their status and functionality. In so doing, the artist investigates the makings and workings of art history, as well as visual imagery and their underlying discourses such as, in the case of El Greco’s painting, the notion of morality and its pictorial representation.

Similar reflections on processes of seeing and being seen permeate the work of Eva Gold, who is presenting a series of work comprising a sculpture made of rubber belts, a urinal, and a drawing representing a room in a sex club. Suggestive of human activities yet devoid of their presence, these works signal a past presence (e.g. how each second hand belt buckle has its own forgotten story with a previous owner), perhaps a recent one, hence sparking the concern that something is lurking and we are being spied on.

 This project has received support from Arts Council England and Fluxus Art Projects.

1.Georges Perec, A Void, tr. G. Adair, London, Harvill Press, 1994, p. 4.