Natalija Gucheva, Abel Hartooni, and Temitayo Olalekan form the curatorial team responsible for Driedee: Hatching from Scratch, an exhibition that opened at Kunsthal Mechelen on 13 December 2024. Over the course of November, they have curated 28 works from a pool of 640 submissions, shaping a distinctive exploration of contemporary three-dimensionality.
The works on view reflect and re-articulate what three dimensionality encompasses today. Thinking through the body, the territory and the imaginary, these artists place us on a course with a variety of conceptual openings–which unfold in the exhibition space in a perpetual engagement with each other on questions regarding friction and subjective transformation. The exhibition proposes the metaphor of an itch as a provocation. The scratch, a resistance to this discomfort, conveyed through the artistsʼ material experimentation, activates their intimated impressions. What emerges from this dynamic interplay is the hatching–an opening which reshapes how the artists perceive, interact with, and inhabit concurrent multidimensional spaces. The works in this exhibition address the body and its sensorial attachments to memory, ecological fragility, language and speculatory crossroads. Through multisensory and spatial approaches, the artists engage the audience in navigating foyers of imagination and inquiry, thus provoking conversation and other practices of seeing, sensing, and hatching–engaging us to start it all from scratch.
The exhibition is realised as a collaboration between Kunstwerkt, Kunsthal Mechelen and Curatorial Studies, Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.