{"id":844155,"date":"2026-09-11T13:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T13:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/844155\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T13:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T13:44:13","slug":"call-me-gravity-the-physicality-of-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/844155\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Call me gravity\u2019: The Physicality of Debt"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new exhibition at Wiels, Brussels foregrounds questions, both vague and precise, about who owes whom, and why<\/p>\n

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\u2019s large, silvery inflatables, Gone, Gone Beyond (2025) and Child: 10 Meditations on property (2026) \u2013 the last shaped to fit around the contours of her pregnant body \u2013 slowly expand and deflate; the strange tension between utility and intimacy in these breathing, industrial polyester forms carries into Tieu\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"Sung Tieu, The Ruling: The Banque de l\u2019Indochine\u2019s Profits, 1875\u20131939, 2025, 47 cm and 40 cm rulers, two woods, engraved, varnished, brackets, 4 \u00d7 1504 \u00d7 2 cm. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

In tonal contrast, Dora Budor and Noah Barker\u2019s Orange Film I \/ Orange Film II (2023) is a giddy meander of handheld camerawork, shot through a glass of orange wine, filming New York\u2019s gentrified neighbourhood near the Highline. Opposite, Budor\u2019s 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\u2019Herbier\u2019s film L\u2019Argent, 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\u2019s otherwise stoic vibe.<\/p>\n

\"\"Dora Budor and Noah Barker, Orange Film I, 2023, HD video, colour, sound, 6 min 42 sec. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. Courtesy the artists<\/p>\n

\"\"Anna\u00efk Lou Pitteloud, Events, 2026, copy of front pages of The New York Times, paint on glass, 70 \u00d7 50 cm. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

Curiously, for a show making strong claims concerning care and reciprocity \u2013 ideas that suggest mutuality \u2013 the works seem a bit disconnected from one another, each commanding, or maybe marooned in, its own physical and conceptual territory. Niloufar Emamifar\u2019s 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, Anna\u00efk Lou Pitteloud\u2019s 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\u2019s Untitled (2024), clay slabs encased in long, low-slung vitrines, seem to almost hide from the audience. Given the show\u2019s concerns with negative spaces, these materially potent works could have felt a bit more demanding.<\/p>\n

\"\"Niloufar Emamifar, The Wolves, 2025, polyurethane resin, soil, asphalt, dust, 380 \u00d7 47 \u00d7 4 cm. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Progetto, Lecce<\/p>\n

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\u2019 individual statements. On balance, though, I don\u2019t 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 \u2018we\u2019re all in it together\u2019 began to circulate, adding yet another irritating dimension to the totalising rhetoric: surely some are \u2018in it\u2019 more than others? French sociologist Marcel Mauss, cited in this show\u2019s curatorial text, argued that debt creates a spiritual bond. As curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou writes in the exhibition essay, \u2018Debt can indeed mean that we have something of the other in us.\u2019 And while one part of me wishes we could simply come together, another is happy to get a bit of respite from it all.<\/p>\n

Call me gravity at Wiels, Brussels, through 20 September<\/a><\/p>\n

From the September 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy.<\/a><\/p>\n

Xenia Benivolski<\/a>Reviews<\/a>September 11, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new exhibition at Wiels, Brussels foregrounds questions, both vague and precise, about who owes whom, and why…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-844155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}