“trifles and troupes, everything lies under the surface”: new exhibition at Blender Gallery

Tracing surfaces of harm or healing, of distraction and amusement, of fantasy or utility

“We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence
on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up
daily life.” — Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (1963)

The Blender Gallery presents the group exhibition trifles and troupes, everything lies under the surface,
curated by Ioanna Gerakidi, from November 28, 2024, to January 25, 2025. The opening reception will
take place on Thursday, November 28, at 19:00. By focusing on that which the political and cultural
scholar Siegfried Kracauer describes as tiny catastrophes, or as surface-level expressions, the exhibition
examines ephemeral gestures that are often dismissed as insignificant, even though they have
historically shaped and still affect psychosocial schemes. trifles and troupes, everything lies under the
surface seeks to explore, transcribe, and ultimately legitimize colloquialisms, diaries, temporary archives,
and micrologies.

The exhibition traces the quotidian as a strategy and a vessel to reveal the multiple potentials of a
surface and along, the unnoticed meaning residing on what’s considered as trivial, ephemeral, popular.
In other words, it aims to establish that which would otherwise remain unobserved by intentionally
encountering its belletristic qualities, always in order to move beyond them. By engaging with both the
temporal and the marginal, the protective and the intrusive, the isolating or the solidary, it longs to
decipher both mundane structures and vexed pasts, to see with, through and beyond popular schemes,
profane themes.

The participating artists, all trace surfaces of harm or healing, of distraction and amusement, of fantasy
or utility creating a constellation resisting to just fill the voids of life. What they request, instead, is
acknowledging and celebrating vocabularies, successions, transformations and sociabilities informed by
the frivolous or the alienating, yet also by hope and trust, and the ecstasies arising when we all, humans
and non humans come together. The exhibition’s works ask to be seen for and through their facets, to be grasped as intrinsic parts of the artists’ lives, both literally and metaphorically.

What does it take to move beyond the visible, to linger over the in-betweens of the real and the
imaginary, to look with the flesh, exposed or veiled, to observe the industrial, to closely touch the
seemingly insignificant, to praise the frenzy? The works exhibited in trifles and troupes, everything lies
under the surface fearlessly ask these questions, longing to stay with all of the oxymora occupying our
realities, conducts, contracts.

The participating artists choose to become with and beyond their
surroundings, to undemonize the trifle, to demytholologize the emblematic, to stay with the risk of
revealing what lies under the surface. And that’s exactly where the exhibition turns into an allegorical
troupe performing our demons and gods, our confusions and certainties, our remorses and
indifferences, validating our surface-level expressions.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public moments.