carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to present the group exhibition The Invisible Structure of the Universe: Part II with works by Michel François, Dor Guez, Abdulhamid Kircher, Santu Mofokeng, Nida Sinnokrot, Joanna Piotrowska and Ian Waelder.

The exhibition invites to reflect on ritual as a given, and as a metaphor in its relationship to the work of art, specifically in the form of photography. To begin with – as famously formulated by Walter Benjamin – the work of art emerges from the ritual. The oldest works of art fulfilled a ritual function. These objects were a direct and central component of once magical, later religious traditions, customs and rites. It was only with the invention of a means of reproducing them with photography, that the artwork gained its independence and freed itself from its “parasitic existence in ritual”, as Benjamin describes. On the one hand, photography liberates the artwork from the ritual, but on the other hand, it can also make it its subject in an indirect recourse. The formal actions of a ritual follow fixed and repeatable patterns, convey meanings, values and convictions and create a community. If the ritual contains all of this, ambivalences and ambiguities open up within its framework. Without being a contradiction, it could be an expression of communal solidarity, resistance or oppression and at the same time an individualized relationship to oneself. It can be site-specific, but it can also create a home, independent of a place. It can do many things and its structure holds our universe, our lives, together.