A new exhibition at Wiels, Brussels foregrounds questions, both vague and precise, about who owes whom, and why
In Call me gravity, seven artists examine where the language of economics seeps into the corporeal. Composed largely of conceptual sculptural works that sprawl across one entire floor of the former brewery, the show foregrounds questions, both vague and precise, about who owes whom, and why. The show is bookended by Sung Tieu, who often uncovers the subtle structural ways in which the state manipulates meaning, and Georgia Sagri, among other things a founder of Occupy Wall Street. Both operate in the negative space around systems and structures, revealing what they exclude, refuse to value and render invisible. Sagri’s large, silvery inflatables, Gone, Gone Beyond (2025) and Child: 10 Meditations on property (2026) – the last shaped to fit around the contours of her pregnant body – slowly expand and deflate; the strange tension between utility and intimacy in these breathing, industrial polyester forms carries into Tieu’s Work Contract (2025), reprinted contracts from German factories. During the 1980s, agreements between East Germany and Vietnam brought Vietnamese workers into state-owned factories, where they lived and worked in precarious conditions. Many workers’ contracts ended abruptly with the reunification of Germany, leaving them without means. Here, factory-made products like underwear and childcare kits are dispersed through the space: personal belongings that appear left behind.
In tonal contrast, Dora Budor and Noah Barker’s Orange Film I / Orange Film II (2023) is a giddy meander of handheld camerawork, shot through a glass of orange wine, filming New York’s gentrified neighbourhood near the Highline. Opposite, Budor’s Vintages III (2025) are two DIY video sculptures assembled from champagne cases, each fitted with another kind of filter: a Fresnel lens, whose concentric rings bend light in wobbly ways, in this case emitted by scenes from Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Argent, made just one year before the 1929 financial crash. The rose-coloured haze of consumerism seemingly links the two filmworks, whose refreshingly freewheeling, tipsy quality breaks up Call me gravity’s otherwise stoic vibe.
Curiously, for a show making strong claims concerning care and reciprocity – ideas that suggest mutuality – the works seem a bit disconnected from one another, each commanding, or maybe marooned in, its own physical and conceptual territory. Niloufar Emamifar’s gorgeously poetic works are negative imprints of land: casts of specific sites made by applying a liquid siliconelike material and lifting it. She looks for spaces neither public nor private, produced by zoning errors or legal ambiguity. To create The Wolves (2025), Emamifar asked the Department of City Planning in Puglia who would own the space between two private property lines; the answer was that the space between properties on a map technically constitutes an agreement between the respective property owners. Her casts give it form, along with the dirt and dust they lift. By contrast, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud’s Events (2026), framed copies of New York Times front pages that illustrate how economic narratives are constructed by the media, are grouped tightly together near the entrance, and easy to miss. Likewise, Gianna Surangkanjanajai’s Untitled (2024), clay slabs encased in long, low-slung vitrines, seem to almost hide from the audience. Given the show’s concerns with negative spaces, these materially potent works could have felt a bit more demanding.
Call me gravity is undeniably well researched and presents a prism of contemporary perspectives on debt, guilt and potentiality, yet camaraderie between women, artists, immigrants, workers and activists somehow remains peripheral to the artists’ individual statements. On balance, though, I don’t mind that. The past decade ushered in many notions of collectivity, yet each was more fraught than the last. During the COVID-19 pandemic, slogans insisting that ‘we’re all in it together’ began to circulate, adding yet another irritating dimension to the totalising rhetoric: surely some are ‘in it’ more than others? French sociologist Marcel Mauss, cited in this show’s curatorial text, argued that debt creates a spiritual bond. As curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou writes in the exhibition essay, ‘Debt can indeed mean that we have something of the other in us.’ And while one part of me wishes we could simply come together, another is happy to get a bit of respite from it all.
Call me gravity at Wiels, Brussels, through 20 September
From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
