As if he’s holding the whole world in his hands, artist Decebal Scriba is walking through the streets gesturing towards a seemingly empty space. His hands, one over the other, leave just enough space for a small, immaterial package. It is with these images, titled The Gift (year) that I got introduced to Scriba’s work. The most impressive aspect about this very gesture that comes with grandeur in the photos is its symbolic weight, representing everything and nothing at the same time. But, alas, it is not nothing that he carries between his hands, it is the metaphysical materiality of the intangible and tangible surroundings. What seems to be empty space is the totality of the fabric of reality. It is this viewpoint onto the real that leads Scriba’s work to engage with different modes of description or measuring the world using man-made systems. For the exhibition in Leipzig, Scriba has been invited to produce a new installation.

Adelina Ivan starts from another totality, another form of infinity. She uses extensive research on Malevich’s ”Black Square” as a starti„ng point, giving way to the totality of the infinite space inside the square. The installation ” The Infinite/The End” (2019) consists of alternating writings of the two words in the title on a mesh-fabric. Every time an ‘the end’ is reached, an infinite can begin; ‘the end’ is but an arbitrary point in an infinite chain and a futile attempt at conquering the infinity. At the same time, the words fill up the space on the fabric until the captions form a black square, thus forging a linguistic materiality to the infinity of Malevich’s Black Square. With a selection of works based on the same starting point, Ivan proposes an artistic approach to unpack the conceptual depths of Malevich’s artwork, as well as its impact on the world. The strategies she applies vary from spatial extension to inversion of the infinite black square, e.g. ”Journal of grids and signs” (2017-2019), a book covered in white mesh with an embedded centred square mirror encapsulating traces of Ivan’s browsing through it in the form of fingerprints on each page. The mirror offers another form of infinity reflected, while the fingerprint in the book hints towards an endless tracing as a description and darkening of that immateriality.