Orbital decay
FRI 02.10.2026 - SUN 06.12.2026
ACUD Galerie

Opening: THU 01.10.2026, 18H
with a performance at 19H:
Bastard Bath solo by Kuba Stępień

Participating artists: Caroline Douville, Manuel Goetz, Samuel Guerrero, Julia Selin, Joshua Tarelle Reid, Zhiyuan Yang

A body in orbital decay has exhausted the forces holding it in relation to a centre. Drawn back into the atmosphere it once escaped, it burns - or it survives the re-entry differently, arriving somewhere else within itself.

Nathan Brown's concept of absolute alienation marks a break with the classical Marxist thought, in which alienation names the worker's estrangement from the product of their labour. Brown argues that under late capitalism, and within what he calls Anthropocenic liberalism, separation has become structural and self-sustaining. The frameworks developed to contest alienation - recognition, representation, inclusion - have been absorbed as mechanisms of the system they were meant to challenge. Power, in this account, produces alienation as the permanent condition of social life, deliberately maintained, strategically weaponised. The retreat, in the face of ecological and political catastrophe, into ethical discourse, appeals to shared humanity, and investment in institutions of recognition. These moves reproduce the structural conditions of contemporary capitalism by failing to account for how capital works at the level of form - how it organises the very categories through which resistance is imagined and pursued. The deeper one seeks recognition within these frameworks, the more tightly one is folded into their logic. Contemporary power distributes itself across financialisation, digital surveillance, precarious labour, and biopolitical administration. Its characteristic operation is to make subjects simultaneously visible and dispossessed - to sort, expose, and render productive while withholding meaning, autonomy, and belonging. Disconnection from one's body, from collective history, from any stable or continuous sense of being, is the active output of this system. To disidentify is to inhabit the terms of one's alienation with a difference - to reoccupy them in ways that generate relations and meanings the system did not anticipate and cannot easily absorb. This is the sense in which the exhibition turns toward alienation. Absolute alienation, inhabited through disidentification, becomes a terrain for invention - for forms of presence, address, and relation that operate outside the circuits of recognition-value.

Édouard Glissant developed the concept of the right to opacity, Opacity names the irreducible density of the other: the dimension of being that exceeds translation and resists the totalising logic of Western epistemology. To assert the right to opacity is to insist that one's complexity need not yield to the demand for comprehensibility, and that this incomprehensibility is a form of dignity. The political purchase of this concept extends, for Glissant, into a general principle of relation: all subjects rendered precarious by the demand for transparency hold the right to remain opaque to the systems that would sort and use them.

The exhibition explores existing in ways that exceed the legibility required for productive subjectification as a political gesture.

Curated by Gabriela Matuszewska