From Rolling Snowball 14: How Are You? (2022), which centered on listening and responding among individuals, to Rolling Snowball 17: Under Construction (2024), which explored the continuous construction and reshaping of everyday landscapes, our attention has been on the subtle yet profound relationship between individual lives and their surrounding environments. Today, as the pace of life accelerates, reality grows increasingly fragmented, and latent crises lurk everywhere. The world around us oscillates repeatedly between the familiar and the strange. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception,” once meant to be a temporary suspension, has quietly become the norm of our daily existence.

The everyday has never been a smooth surface. It is often regarded as a silent and stable backdrop – a foundation composed of habits, repetitions, and self-evident conventions that supports those prominent moments we call “events”. However, as public health crises, geopolitical upheavals, and challenges in technological ethics arise one after another, the boundary between the everyday and the non – everyday grows increasingly blurred. The lines between the individual and the collective, the center and the periphery, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are no longer brief transitional gaps but have become the core sites of our lived experience. They fold, intertwine, and permeate one another, forming a complex topological structure, a metaphor evoked by “folds”.

The “fold” here is not a negative notion. Rather, it describes a dialectic of existence within modernity: an intermediate state that is neither the stable old order nor the new normal yet to arrive. In this folded reality, the everyday is in constant collapse, yet within its fissures, creative potential continuously emerges. We are pushed into a threshold state in which old identities and structures have loosened, while new stable forms have not yet taken shape.

This exhibition seeks to capture and examine this existential condition. Rather than constructing grand visions of a new world, the artists delve into the textures of lived experience, touching and revealing the forms of these “folds.” Their works function like slices of an interstitial time-space, where the fold becomes both the site and the method. It bears the imprint of memory and hints at future possibilities. Within those borderlands where boundaries are broken and remade, new modes of perception and fluid orders are slowly taking shape.

The exhibition is jointly presented by the Chinese European Art Center, the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou, and Xiamen Powerlong Art Center.

Artist
Donglai Meng 孟东来丨Emilie Hudig
Fangzhou Wu 吴方洲
Guda Koster & Frans van Tartwijk
Hrafnkell Sigurðsson丨Hulya Yilmaz
Jing Jin 金晶丨Jun Zhang 张骏
Maria Barnas丨Mariëlle van den Bergh
Mels Dees丨Nabuurs & Van Doorn
Rik Nieuwdorp丨Yuxuan Cui 崔喻璇

Gallery