During a residency in 2016, at the invitation of Galerie Stadtpark with AIR–Artist-in-Residence Lower Austria, a conversation was initiated between the London-based artist Jaimini Patel and the Archiv der Zeitgenossen.  Drawn to the sense of absence created by the distinctive architecture of its reading rooms, the artist felt compelled to consider the empty shelves lining the walls.  The ensuing work is a deliberation on the nature of matter, memory and time.

Patel investigates the agency of matter through a negotiation of boundaries, systems and performative actions in order to re-evaluate our relationship with the material world.  For this new work, she has collected and arranged materials and objects from the daily activities of living and making art, over the last 18 months.  These fragments, residues and leftovers that would ordinarily be abandoned, become the main protagonists in shifting landscapes of relations.  Arranged initially by colour, the materials begin to establish other connections through shared characteristics, processes undergone or the activities that generate them.  As more nuanced links emerge, and families of objects pull other objects to them with varying potency, they defy the imposition of premeditated categorisation, and rely instead on something more instinctual and mutable.  The accidents that brought them together might be considered a system of a kind.   In time, more complex networks come in and out of focus.  Still life, both object and image, these dislocated materials occupy the shelves of a reading room replete with its own conceptual structures and ambience.  Reading these ephemeral objects and the intervals between them requires the kind of time that such a space engenders. 

The exhibition opens on 24 November 2017 and continues until 31 January 2018.

Archiv der Zeitgenossen (Zugang über Kesselhaus), 3500 Krems, Dr. Karl Dorrek-Straße 30

For more information, please see http://www.archivderzeitgenossen.at/en/events/details/details/jaimini-patel-an-inventory-of-small-acts/