T. Gerards’ and Heidi Holmström’s show Reality Check is an insistence on invisible structures. One has to imagine oneself, if one is willing to, standing in front of, next to, and beside these works, making oneself question how these works—and the curatorial choices surrounding them—came about. What exactly are the systems of emotional and theoretical resonance that hold these works together? This moment of disastrous unknowing is exactly what lies at the heart of the show. It is a brute force, a recognisable landscape. But like every mountain, tree, and river we see again and again, we find ourselves redescribing what these landscapes consist of, recognising the brute forces that make our realities into modes of comfort, creating an echo through space and, ultimately, through the viewer themselves. Here, however, echo and repetition allow an act of violence to enter the space. Violence can be described as a series of vertical obstructions that create an anti-synthesis of the landscape: a space of no resolution. It navigates a sharp cut, a negativity performed in the space through these sculptural works, which surrender themselves to a condition of non-sovereignty. An artwork that responds to the violence of living is not required to explain or describe the violence; it can equate itself with it.

Gerards’ and Holmström’s works relate to one another through a systemic failure of language, working instead through an emotional resonance with it. This “violence of living” of course negates itself through the dialogue these artists have emerged within—not only through their email exchange, which has unfolded over time, but also through their work. Language here is not actively seeking to make itself clear. We are dealing with materials such as plexiglass, sound-absorbent foam, tongue clicks, clock hands, and metal: materials that possess a resistant sensibility towards clearness, towards openness, and, more importantly, towards abstraction. A clear example is the echo that takes over the space through Holmström’s sculpture Echo Bouncers.

Gerards’ and Holmström’s works relate to one another through a systemic failure of language, working instead through an emotional resonance with it. This “violence of living” of course negates itself through the dialogue these artists have emerged within—not only through their email exchange, which has unfolded over time, but also through their work. Language here is not actively seeking to make itself clear. We are dealing with materials such as plexiglass, sound-absorbent foam, tongue clicks, clock hands, and metal: materials that possess a resistant sensibility towards clearness, towards openness, and, more importantly, towards abstraction. A clear example is the echo that takes over the space through Holmström’s sculpture Echo Bouncers.

Here, the movement from symbol to structure becomes a movement towards the body. The echo does not remain contained within the work but reaches the viewer, becoming embodied as another form of resonance. The viewer is therefore not simply positioned in front of the sculpture but becomes part of its structure, another echo bouncer within the space. The body becomes the site through which the work’s violence and repetition are registered.

In OLA VII (2026), this relation between material and body takes another form. The transparency of the fibreglass and epoxy turns the box into something like a skin, with things laminated between its layers, some visible and others withheld from view placing the work under tension, as though attempting either to break the space down or to pull something towards itself. The obstruction is therefore not simply a barrier but a force distributed across the space: something that holds, stretches, conceals, and exposes at once.

Vertical obstructions then become another work within the space: a mise-en-scène. They stand above, beyond, and beside the spectre as another form. The vertical obstruction is initially something that cannot simply be followed or set aside; instead, it begins to stimulate a lateral circulation, forcing the viewer to move around, beside, and through the works. They require a choreography with the viewer, whose attention is not asked for but taken by the abstractions that position anti-resolution in relation to what they want you to feel. This is where the thinking of negativity realises itself in a more artistic form. A sharp cut, a rupture through space, completely unravels itself through the works. This negativity can be thought through Adornian thinking, which allows contradiction to become a mode of aesthetic speculation. The circularity of the objects becomes a direct interpretation of the artists’ circular mode of thinking. A spiral, too, can be thought of as an example of this negative dialecticism: eating itself into a non-resolute space, without arriving at synthesis or resolution.

Non-identity becomes a playful form, a way of distancing itself from the image of the artist in relation to a certain milieu. Negativity then becomes part of these recognisable landscapes, seen through many different eyes. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman write:

“Negativity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change.”

The images and forms of familiarity laid out in the show, and its choreography as a method of vertical obstruction, create new narratives of movement and thought. Erotics lie in the refusal enacted through sculptural intervention and abstracted materials. It is a form of resistance that is both inviting and appealing to the viewer. Refusal is said to be the first degree of passivity. But if refusal is deliberate and voluntary, if it expresses a decision, though this be a negative one—it does not yet allow separation from the power of consciousness, and comes no closer to passivity than this act of refusal on the part of a self. And yet refusal does tend toward the absolute, independent of any determination whatsoever.

This movement from symbol to structure, from material to body, also recalls the stigmata: the wound becomes the site where belief, image, violence, and embodiment collapse into one another. In OLA IV (2025), the image is attached directly to the wall through bolts piercing the hands and feet. The body is therefore not simply represented as the site of violence; violence becomes part of the work’s material condition. The piercing of the image turns representation into an act of physical intervention, making the wound simultaneously an image, an attachment, and a structure. The body is no longer simply the recipient of an image or an external force, but the surface upon which these relations become indistinguishable. In this sense, the tear at the beginning and end of the text is not simply an image of emotion. It becomes another material uncertainty: something that appears to reveal the body while withholding the certainty of its origin.

Like the tear that sheds itself onto the warm cheek, the show allows you familiarity. It is (in)sincere in its aesthetics; it wants you to immerse yourself in this vertical resistance as a witness, as its victim and its oppressor at the same time, an amorous assemblage. As the camera pulls out from the eye to the face, more tears are revealed: first one beneath the eye, then more, on the bridge and side of the nose, on the upper lip. All this happens at the same time as a droplet falls from a matted twist of hair onto the bathroom floor. The effect is to retroactively place under suspicion the truth of that tear: that tear that may just be a drop, that tear that does not fall but sits thickly next to the eye without revealing its source or its embodied secret—whether it was secreted at all.