This Dusk Song

Located in an old yarn factory in the French countryside, This Dusk Song is an exhibition of architectural, material and elemental intimacy found in the work of Dutch artist Gwenneth Boelens. Together Boelens and curator Eloise Sweetman gently bring that intimacy to the audience of Treignac Projet and its surrounds.

The location and the industrial history complement and elevate Boelens’s investigation into forgotten weaving techniques and the use of striking fibres such as electro-conductive and reflective threads in her works. In particular, with an intricate site-specific installation, Boelens attunes to Treignac Projet’s multiple exhibition sites by threading basalt, copper, and steel fibres over rollers, spindles, and pulleys reclaimed from textile machinery from the factory’s heyday. The installation stretches across beams, runs down the wall, and journeys across the floor. It is a song and a growing corpus that cannot be grasped in its totality.

Boelens’s new installation is set in dialogue with The very thing we don’t know is always trying to expand (2016), a two-channel film work based on interviews with Erik Verlinde, theoretical physicist, about his yet -to-be released theory. Boelens has been intrigued by Verlinde’s process of finding new ways to think about ever-challenging topics like gravity, the 95 percent of undefined ‘matter’ in the universe, and how these topics resist visibility.

This Dusk Song is made possible by Stichting Stokroos Foundation, Stichting Niemeijer Foundation and Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Paris.

Photo credit: Shimmer Archive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Eloise Sweetman.