GILBERT HAGE

Dancing in the Rain was the initial call though the setup involved no choreography and no actual rain, yet each participant stood exposed to water, wet beneath a shower. From encounter to encounter, the work evolved. The invitation opens Blanchot’s infinite conversation: relation without resolution. The call continued as I Was Seven the Day I Came Home Completely Soaked, a title that does not so much recall an event as establish a condition: exposure, return, a body altered by water. It situates the work in time while refusing narrative closure. The significance lies not in what occurred, running beneath a sudden downpour, tripping and falling into a pool, but in what persists when bodies are exposed to water. Water sets rhythm, adhesion, resistance, and surface tension. Skin becomes membrane; garments become weighted surfaces; breath gathers above saturated torsos.

From Muybridge’s chronophotographic serial instants to Man Ray’s luminous traces, from Halsman’s jumpology at gravity’s apex to Mendieta’s earth-body imprints, artists have tested suspension and the aesthetics of the any-instant-whatever. Hage seems to register the pull of these precedents, alongside Matisse’s La Piscine (1952). If the monumentality of his installation recalls Viola’s Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005) where water stages ascent toward a transcendent horizon, Hage’s water anchors. Fabric drags; breath meets resistance; duration thickens rather than dissolves.

In the installation, men together and women together form a kind of horizon across the gallery walls. The work surrounds without enclosing. What unfolds is not communion. No shared rhythm gathers the bodies into unity. Presence as edge enacting Blanchot’s neuter. They remain proximate, without coincidence. Relation persists through interval. Separation is enacted in and through the medium of water, across successive encounters. Bare exteriority persists, desire in distance

Courtesy Galerie Tanit, Beyrouth/Munich. Text: Ghada Waked.