OBTUSE (°) resists immediate clarity. Making no attempt to rescue the viewer from uncertainty.
- Jan 2
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 6
In London’s contemporary art landscape there has been a quiet emergence of independent, curator-led platforms designed to “stir up how we experience art”, launching initiatives that “favour depth over novelty, process over product”, and creating “spaces where artists could expose their work and express their voices without censorship”. Such platforms include Teaspoon Projects, Display Fever,
and Obtuse Archive.
Obtuse Archive, co-founded by Selin Kir, and Yang Rung Chen, presented its first programme as part of an ongoing series — a two-day event of exhibition, live sound, performance, and collective gathering that took place from 18 to 19 December at Galleria Objets.
By Khaya Mnisi
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The exhibition brought together a group of artists whose works “hinge, bend, and hover rather than settle”, asking the viewer to linger and puzzle. This may sound obvious to some. Isn’t that what much art sets out to do — to draw us into altered spaces where familiar things are distorted, reimagined, and stripped back?
However, what distinguished the work presented in OBTUSE (°) for me was not ambiguity alone, but the way it unsettled my habitual ways of looking and thinking about art.
It recalled what bell hooks writes in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics: “art is necessarily a terrain of defamiliarization: it may take what we see/know and make us look at it in a new way.”
Engaging with OBTUSE (°) through its documentation, images, and supporting texts — and especially through images of the artists’ works — I found myself encountering art in a way that felt unusually heightened and unfamiliar. Trying to make sense of the exhibition felt a bit like gulping down two entire bottles of wine in the span of an hour — for reasons we don’t need to get into here — after having trained yourself to only ever drink two glasses a day. There was a loss of balance, a sense that something had shifted, even if I couldn’t quite locate where.
A large part of me felt unsettled — not repelled, but held in a space where my own assumptions about what art is, or should be, began to feel unstable. I also felt that particular confusion and low-level anxiety that emerges when I want to form a relationship with a work of art but are not yet sure how to approach it.
Across the exhibition, certain qualities kept reappearing: distorted or obscured figures (as seen in the work of Yutaro Inagaki and Lola Dupre); altered and hybrid forms (Abigail Norris, Zeus Li, Irene Pouliassi); visuals that read like “fragments from an unfolding dark fantasy”; and the use of familiar objects and materials pushed to the point of estrangement.
What stayed with me most, however, was a growing curiosity. I found myself genuinely interested in the fact that this group of artists, working within London, are pushing into territories of art I might once have been hesitant to explore. I was equally appreciative of the curatorial decisions that shaped the exhibition. There is no attempt here to smooth the work out or rescue the viewer from uncertainty.
Ultimately, engaging with unfamiliar art requires a particular kind of openness — not blind acceptance or forced admiration, but a willingness to be challenged. OBTUSE (°) asks for that kind of viewer.
Following this engagement with OBTUSE (°) I spoke with Selin Kir and Yang Rung Chen about the curatorial thinking behind OBTUSE (°). Read Here: A Conversation with the curators of OBTUSE(°)
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