Agis dans ton lieu, pense avec le monde – Act in your place, think with the world.
Édouard Glissant
With RELATION(ES), Galerie Melbye-Konan opens its new exhibition space in a 800 m² late 19th-century (Gründerzeit) villa. The exhibition is conceived as an open spatial framework in which artistic positions are not presented in isolation, but embedded in relational fields of tension. At its core lies Édouard Glissant’s concept of “Relation” as a non-hierarchical model of world-making, where meaning emerges through difference, contact, and displacement. Identity is understood not as a fixed attribution, but as a shifting network of relations.
The works by Yannick Ackah, Nathalie David, François Martinache, Stellar Meris, Ngoye, Araks Sahakyan and Karolin Schwab develop distinct forms of relational thinking. Painting, drawing, object, installation, and digital processes do not appear as separate media, but overlap and interweave into open constellations.The exhibition space itself becomes part of this structure. The architecture of the villa, with its sightlines, transitions, and spatial sequences, produces no linear dramaturgy, but a circulating mode of perception. Between the works, dynamic in-between spaces emerge in which coexistence takes precedence over hierarchy or narration.
In Glissant’s sense, opacity is not understood as a deficit, but as a productive condition: a right to non-completeness and a resistance to clarity and reduction. Meaning does not arise through the dissolution of difference, but through its sustained presence.
The artistic positions articulate these perspectives in distinct ways: Yannick Ackah connects Western and West African visual traditions in a deliberately tension-filled coexistence. Nathalie David works with fragile drawn gestures as poetic residual traces. François Martinache shifts photographic and digital layers between document and abstraction. Stellar Meris condenses bodily experience into unstable painterly fields. Ngoye develops process-based painting between figuration and dissolution. Araks Sahakyan unfolds hybrid image spaces in which origin, language, and identity appear as open conditions. Karolin Schwab introduces minimal sculptural interventions that precisely recalibrate spatial relations.
RELATION(ES) thus understands itself not as a closed narrative, but as an open system of relations. The exhibition does not produce a linear structure, but a sensitive field of difference, resonance, and displacement that continuously reconfigures itself within the space.
An exhibition curated by Stella Melbye-Konan, Curatorial assistance by Iris Zine Ikis
