The four-person exhibition A Question of Intervals and Scales, which opens on the 3rd of June, 2024 at SAP Space, on the occasion of the Project Space Festival, ponders the way shifts in scale, with an intrinsic algorithm that borders alchemistry, enable bodies to understand and recognize space, environment, and by extension, world. Works by Alizée Armet, Janne Höltermann, Nadja Verena Marcin, and Sidsel Ladegaard approach the topic of scale from different perspectives, and reveal how bodies — human or otherwise — make and manifest relations.

Alizée Armet’s specimen of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are tiny slices of an organism that is also simultaneously a system as well as an amorphous body, one that is always relational, rarely visible, and vital to living matter. In an almost opposite take on the question of scale, Janne Höltermann’s work depicts massive container ships moving across a landscape as the camera slowly zooms in and then out, rendering these containers — carriers of objects that make up our daily lives and environs — into minute, abstracted pixels. Both Nadja Verena Marcin and Sidsel Ladegaard’s works prompt questions of scale in relation to our own human bodies. Sidsel’s quiet and contemplative outdoor sculptures act as a kind of index of the human body in labor, in leisure, and when placed amongst the composition of a garden, the overlap of the two. Nadja, on the other hand, takes on the “woman in nature” theme by using her own body as a tool of confrontation, and creates a tension between the female body and the complex assumptions about its representation.

To tackle the topic of scale in 2024 also raises questions about the destructive scale of human impact, of the power of collectivity, of the colossal ways invisible viruses can intervene in our lives, bodies, and politics. It also references one of Capitalism’s favorite words: “scalability,” an ethos rooted in expansionism and maximizing productivity. Yet scale shifts also imply distance and time, how things get smaller when farther away, how pain is dulled with time, how both distance and time, indeed, offer clarify and reflection. A Question of Intervals and Scales hopes to carve out a little space to contemplate these bigger thoughts. And in some ways, the garden, a “scaled-back” abstraction of nature, seems an apt place for these many layered considerations.

Text by Ilyn Wong