Alicja Kwade
Alicja Kwade, Dusty Die, at M Leuven: the exhibition runs until February the 22nd, 2026.
An accompanying publication will be released to coincide with the exhibition.
The Polish artist Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice) works from her Berlin-based practice to examine how sculptural, spatial, photographic, filmic and drawn works challenge and renegotiate our assumptions regarding reality, perception and matter, while probing the scientific and philosophical concepts that underpin our understanding of gravity, time(-space) and knowledge. By acknowledging the generative power of doubt and imagination, she poeticizes and playfully distorts these notions, shifting their meaning and subtly unsettling our visual and conceptual frameworks. She accomplishes this by rearranging, reworking or manipulating seemingly simple objects, ranging from natural materials such as wood, petrified trunks, boulders, ancient rocks and minerals to metals including steel, copper, aluminum, brass and bronze and to optical-reflective or technological elements such as mirrors and clocks. Kwade does not merely present matter, but the very conditions under which matter acquires form and meaning.
Currently, M Leuven presents Alicja Kwade’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, Dusty Die (curator: Eva Wittocx, assistant curator: Ralph Collier), in which existing works are reconfigured and complemented by newly realized pieces. Dusty evokes the image of an object covered in dust, a substance associated with impermanence and the passing of time. Without dust particles we would not perceive the sky as blue, prominently present in the exhibition. This becomes apparent in the astonishingly spatial work Blue Days Dust (II) (2025), whose walls are painted with pigment derived from lapis lazuli, also present as a colossal stone block of 2180 kg placed at the center of the room, or in the numerous blue stone spheres resembling miniature models of our blue planet, scattered across the floor or positioned on a replica of a chair (Siège du monde, 2025). Die refers to the cube-shaped die, the archetypal object in which chance, probability and unpredictability materialize. In the video installation In Ewig Den Zufall Betrachtend (2014), which opens the exhibition, visitors are immersed in near-total darkness. On several screens, dice float in slow, suspended motion, caught in an endless loop. The accompanying sound evokes the hum of space itself, as though the artist were travelling back to the origin of the universe, to the moment in which renewal and open-ended possibility accompanied the evolution of still-unsettled physical laws.
What eludes our understanding is rendered with incisive and monumental clarity in Paraposition (2024), composed of two slender interlocking steel frames holding two massive natural boulders. Beneath one of the stones stands a bronze chair that visitors may sit on. Behind this work stretches a large-scale photograph of a grey stormy sky in Berlin (2025). In this way, Kwade demonstrates that reality is not simply perceived but continually recomposed from multiple vantage points and is especially generated through what escapes our sight, becoming the very condition for meaning itself. In the same exhibition space, separated from the previous by three doors, stands a sculpture of a fourth door, rolled up around its vertical axis: Eadem Mutata Resurgo (2014). Its twisted form refers to the logarithmic spiral. Kwade’s metaphysics of everyday objects reveals the object as a poetic instrument that has abandoned its own logic. In a darkened gallery, a light bulb swings back and forth, with an invisible microphone attached that amplifies the whispering friction of its movement through the air: Nach Osten (2011/2013). This work is inspired by the Foucault pendulum, with which the French scientist Léon Foucault demonstrated in 1851 that the Earth rotates on its axis. Kwade uses a weighted light bulb that, like the original, describes a circular movement and returns to its starting point after the time required for one rotation of the Earth. Although its title refers to the eastward rotation of the Earth, Kwade’s version swings counter to this direction, toward the west.
In Dusty Die, the viewer is repeatedly confronted with the sensual intimacy between the tenuousness of matter and the minimality of meaning, as though the world itself whispers that it can only be known in ceaseless motion, in contingent correlations and tremors of the almost-nothing. Alicja Kwade’s work stretches like a sensitive membrane between thought and intuition: it registers the slightest shift in our gaze as well as the deep, physical resonance of not-knowing.