(Un)Systemized

June 11th, 2025 – June 30th, 2025

Opening: June 11th, 6pm

Artists: Liu Guangli & Wu Huimin | Thomas Garnier | So Kanno

Curator: Paula Zeng

         The horizon wavers. Orientation has become disorientation.
         — Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective*

espace temps presents: (Un)Systemized, a group exhibition running from June 11 to 30, 2025, featuring recent works by four artists: Paris-based Chinese duo artist Liu Guangli & Wu Huimin, French artist Thomas Garnier and Berlin-based Japanese artist So Kanno.

In a world governed by algorithms and automation, systemization operates as an invisible force — fluid, sprawling, and omnipresent. (Un)Systemized explores the tension between control and collapse, between apparent order and underlying disorder. Within this precarious balance, meaning-making becomes an ambiguous act: caught between analytical reasoning and intuitive projection, interpretation itself emerges as a tool for transforming reality.

In the face of emerging so-called “intelligent” systems that mediate our perception of information and consequently shape our view of the world, the structures forged by humanity, whether political, technological or symbolic, begin to waver, mutate or collapse. In this compressed time where past, present and future merge, and where the natural and the artificial intertwine, our reference points begin to erode. Who are we in a world where thresholds are fading?

The four artists featured in this exhibition engage through interdisciplinary artistic languages, integrating technologies such as AI-generated imagery, 3D printing, and robotic programming. Their works delve into complex themes surrounding perception, power, and technology. Each piece becomes a medium for sensing the hidden and invisible, serving as a form of alert or ritual in response to a world in constant flux.

The exhibition opens with Seeing Silence (2025), a video installation by Liu Guangli and Wu Huimin, based on an examination of the development of energy infrastructure, weaving together technical narratives with the visual poetry of slow-motion explosions. The work depicts the gradual self-destruction of electronic objects — circuit breakers, wiring, and control panels — remnants of a world saturated by its own mechanisms. Frame by frame, the stretched image develops an aesthetics of ruin: an inverted archaeology where ashes sketch the outline of an uncertain future. Amid the shattered components emerges the idea of a ground in formation, a fertile disorder. Destruction becomes an act of resistance, a refusal of an opaque system of control.

In a silent dialogue, Thomas Garnier’s sculptural works extend the reflection on ruin and transformation. His imagined architectures, derived from classical or industrial forms, appear as relics of a parallel world. In Exuviae I-III, 2025, the collapsed column becomes an icon of an abolished time: Its surface is artificially eroded, revealing at its core a filigree-like structure that is light and almost digital, resembling a fragile skeleton of a world either long past or still to come.

In Liminiarium(alpha),a mechanical device sets a series of 3D-printed arches into motion, in a state of perpetual reconfiguration. The passage becomes a shifting threshold, a landscape of eternal recurrence. These forms, both technological and archaic, compose a looping terrain in which visibility continually escapes its own stability.

In the underground space, Thomas Garnier’s installation Augures (Forest) unfolds as a suspended forest — slow and spectral. Along motorized rails, the light sources glide across resin bas-reliefs inspired by 19th-century translucent lithophanes. The AI-generated landscapes, architectures, data centers, appear and vanish depending on the angle and intensity of the light. As in the Lascaux caves, vision is shaped by fire, though here is replaced by the mechanical movement of a cold light. Artificial life structures such as servers, cables, data centers, become the lianas of a new, post-human and ritualistic world. The human figure kneels in reverence before these silent technological deities. In this shadow theater, ruins are no longer lifeless: they breathe through the gestures of machines, endlessly replaying the memory of a world suspended between myth and volatile memory.

Resonating within So Kanno’s Chirping Machines’ spaces, natural communication systems such as birdsong and frog croaks become raw materials for a language recreated by machines. Through algorithmic programming, the artist generates a new sonic ecosystem where animals seem to dialogue, listen, and modulate their calls according to a logic conceived by humans. This hybrid work evokes ancestral rituals of communication with the living, from the hunting culture, Japanese Toribue flute to shamanic chants. Yet here, it is the machine that orchestrates, not replacing nature but offering it a mask. Between hyperreality and sonic fiction, the work questions the possibility of a shared language or its irrevocable loss.

In How to Imagine the Unimaginable (2024), a video work by Liu Guangli in collaboration with Chen Zirui, the work is based on an intimate narrative drawn from the restoration of childhood dinosaur drawings, remnants of an imagination formed before the advent of language. By hybridizing these with AI-generated images inspired by early paleontological reconstructions and media representations, the artists reshape the visual memory of a fantasized past. The piece oscillates between restitution and invention, between repair and drift. By confronting the innocence of the child’s gesture with the cold generative logic of algorithms, the artist questions what is transmitted and what is lost in the transition from an analog imagination to a mechanical thought. Fiction becomes a site of survival, a speculative language to inhabit the cracks of reality.

The exhibition draws to a close with So Kanno’s interactive installation Lasermice Dyad (2020). In darkness, a swarm of robotic mice weaves through space, driven by vibrating motors and electromagnets that modulate the environment according to a logic of controlled  spontaneity. Originally inspired by the silent synchronization of fireflies, the work renders invisible communication tangible. Laser beams cross, colors shift, rhythms pulse. Echoes of motors and glimmers of light converge, immersing the viewer in a flowing tension between order and chaos.

We are drawn to the communication systems and phenomena of animals in nature, such as frog choruses, cricket songs, and flocks in flight. The installation attempts to seek a new language system through an original algorithm. Its minimalist choreography becomes a metaphor for collective behavior, reflecting riots, contagion, and emotional surges. It gestures toward the fragile complexity of systems, where the slightest shift can lead to cascading collapse.

Here, movement becomes a written trace, and disorder turns into code.

Text by Paula Zeng

* “The horizon quivers. Orientation has become disorientation.”
Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, e-flux journal no. 24 (2011).

Liu Guangli

Liu Guangli was born in 1990 in Lengshuijiang, China. He currently lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2020. Guangli’s works often emerge from the intersection of different approaches to depicting history and events, and ultimately find their own places in installations, videos, documentaries, and paintings that suggest our understanding of the present is often shaped by pre-existing languages, social norms, and media formats through which pieces of information are transmitted. He won the Golden Nica and Honorary Mention in the Computer Animation category at Ars Electronica (2021, 2022), as well as the Golden Key for Best Short Film at Kassel Dokfest (2021), Special mention price at Jimei Arles Discovery Award (2023), Outstanding Art Exploration Award at Beijing International Short Film Festival (2023).

Wu Huimin

Wu Huimin, born in Shanxi in either 1989 or 1991, currently lives and works in Paris. She graduated from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and the École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques de Monaco (Pavillon Bosio). The ambiguity of her birth year reflects her interest in the drifting and fluidity of events, as well as the blurred boundaries between identity and reality. Rooted in a keen observation of social dynamics and current affairs, her practice playfully engages with and conforms to shifting realities, capturing the subtle connections between individuals and their ever-changing environments.

Born in 1991, Thomas Garnier is a french contemporary and visual artist intitialy trained as an architect from the Superior national school of architecture of Paris val de Seine. He then graduated from the Fresnoy National studio for Contemporary Arts where he was awarded ‘‘Digital arts revelations’’ by the ADAGP, society of french artists for his graduating installation Cenotaph.

His work has since been shown at international exhibitions, fairs, festivals and biennials such as the Nuit Blanche (Brussels, Belgium), the WRO media art biennial (Wroslaw, Poland), Nemo biennial & Chroniques biennal (Paris & Marseilles, France), Ignite festival and museum (Miami, USA), Noise media art fair (Istanbul,Turkey) and in foundations such as the Fosun Foundation (Shanghai, China) and the Fiminco Foundation (Paris, France).

His practice is that of an artist but also of a researcher or a heterotopologist, as defined by Foucault in his text ’’les espaces autres’’ (the other spaces). This search and construct of meaning in the liminal and in states of in between brings him to produce automated and collapsing concrete model landscapes, infinitly looping images of ruins photocollages, displays that randomly compose linguistical accumulations and robotic shadow projections from wireframe 3d printed sculptures.

He thus seeks singular and distant places which question the conscious and unconscious manufacture of space. The critical nature of the works develop through wandering, and the observation of real spaces. In Thomas Garnier’s work we seem to witness the archaeology of a drifting and derived world, caught between and obsessed by the congregation of multiple timeframes and techniques, derived from nonexisting primal-fu-turism, retro-additivism, multi-brutalism, supra-romantism or any word accumulation that you could dream of by yourself.

Born in 1984, So Kanno is a media artist based in Berlin since 2013. He graduated from Musashino Art University and later from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS). He currently serves as a Project Professor at Aichi University of the Arts in Japan.

Kanno’s artistic practice primarily revolves around robotics. His notable works include “Lasermice,” a swarm of robots designed to imitate the collective behavior of small animals, and “Kazokutchi,” a robotic host for digital artificial life represented as NFTs. Rather than pursuing perfect control typical of industrial robotics, Kanno explores unpredictability, emergence, and system errors. He intentionally designs systems that embrace and amplify these qualities. His practice spans installations, performances, and workshops, frequently utilizing his custom-built robots and often developed through collaborative efforts.

CURATRICE｜Paula Zeng

Paula Zeng is a curator, researcher, and arts project manager. She holds degrees in art history and archaeology from Sorbonne University and the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

Her early academic work explored the performativity of the image medium in the documentation of installation and performance art, as well as the power structures and latent forms of violence embedded in contemporary systems of image production and circulation. In recent years, her curatorial practice has focused on supporting interdisciplinary and multimedia artistic research, while fostering international collaboration and exchange.

She has worked with the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris, international galleries, independent publishing studios, and non-profit arts organizations. She has coordinated or contributed to over thirty international exhibitions, including Playlab, Inc. with the K11 Foundation (2020), the Biennale NOVA_XX at the CWB(2021), and the Traversée du Marais Festival (2022). In 2019, she served as executive curator for the first Chinese edition of Oplineprize. Since 2017, she has been a regular collaborator with Studio Paramonumental, contributing to a range of exhibitions and artistic projects.