Four Suns | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series

24 new black jackets are arranged on hangers. We lift our eyes to them. We are experienced consumers, well-trained in the world’s finest malls, we immediately understand what we must do. We approach the rack, take in the newness and brush against the sacred.

In the heart of the temple of capital, Liam Chambon finds refuge. As if stranded in a country where culture was obliterated, where screening films has been forbidden, the artist encrypted his messages inside the soft lining of security guards’ jackets. There he stitched and edited 24 frames from two sources: subtitles of an austere dialogue from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal and images of a galloping white horse from a commercial video archive. This brief moment fuses a religious-existential apocalyptic vision with a visual world which is flattened to the point of meaninglessness. The knight in Bergman’s film makes his way home after years of combat in the Crusades, riding a horse through a plague-ravaged country, reflecting on the nature of death. The horse blinks, closes its eyes, opens them, and closes them again.

In the chosen dialogue, the knight, who has already witnessed all forms of death, is tired and bored even with himself. Out of this existential boredom, Chambon sets out to revive the commodity fetish as a shining screen, a last defense against the futility of life in a society addicted to the spectacle of death.

Through the row of jackets, two silver lions appear, hanging on a chain, swaying in an electric breeze, hypnotizing us into our next purchase. Here, too, Chambon blends the religious with the commodified, the fashionable with the mythical. The sound of the fan’s whirring is all that remains of the roar of the two bound lions, descendants of the Kingdom of Judah, symbols of power, albeit very small.

The spatial logic guiding Chambon is that of store layouts, combined with lessons learned from minimalist sculpture, both of which emerged at the heyday of Western liberal democracy: right angles, duplication, and a pretense of purity. This layout logic fails to vanquish the objects’ inner logic. The mythical bestial power of the roaring lion and the galloping horse are stronger.

Hillel Roman

Events:

Saturday 8.3.25, at 12pm | Gallery Talk in the exhibition, with the artist Liam Chambon and the curator Hillel Roman