Estelle Marois

not before it has forgotten you

Group exhibition
Clémentine Bruno, Mara Fortunatović, Eva Gold, Bella Riza
Nicoletti, London
7 April—15 May 2022

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’.

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, Mara Fortunatović, Eva Gold, and Bella Riza. 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 marks cast by what has disappeared.

After a first iteration at The Pole Gallery in Paris, an outdoor display of single artworks on a street pole in Le Marais—a genuine piece of urban furniture witnessing the permanency of urban fluxes—not before it has forgotten you traveled to Nicoletti, London, developing into a public programme (film screening, reading, and talk), a sound piece by artist and curator Sandra Jean Pierre, and a publication designed by Rose Nordin from OOMK Zine.

not before it has forgotten you is co-curated by Caroline Drevait and Estelle Marois.