The exhibition realized by Sari Palosaari proposes the opening of an interrogation about the possibility of overcoming the prejudices inserted in our way of relating to things in nature and in everyday life through artistic meditations on the certainty of our scientific knowledge. Perception experiments performed in the minimal frames of conceptual and meditative video images, and inherent in the material presence of earth, glass, plastic, liquid, are transformed into thought experiences that are potentiated by references to the hybrid philosophy of new materialism and science studies and to the capacity of the public to calibrate their sensibilities in relation to the specificity of the dynamics of visiting the exhibition in the porous layers of the space.

In the subsidiarity of the practice of the Finnish artist Sari Palosaari, one can identify counter-narrative threads subtracted from real facts and situations which, however, are poetically and philosophically abstracted in the process of editing production or thinking of the exhibition installation. Either it works with performing objects (by injecting a silent agent [a “snail dynamite”] that expands and open the objects during their exposure), or deconstructs the filmed images (through editing processes based on overlayers and decompositions of the temporality of filming), Sari Palosaari is interested in reporting the impact of change in the lived reality, in a world that is compulsively disordered, self-performing.

In the case of the Borderline Art Space exhibition, Sari Palosaari proposes to explore the concept of “exteriority-within” developed by Karen Barad in her attempt to describe the philosophy of agential realism. In short, the term used by Barad refers to accepting that the boundaries of things are porous and they are changing depending on our situatedness from the perspective of different fields of knowledge. Things and humans can intra-act, thus generating moments of opening, but also of separation. The notion of “exteriority-within-phenomena” is approached from the perspective of distrust in the possibility of understanding what we see as manifesting outside of us, as long as the spatiality outside our perception is captured by language, but whose topology may be constantly changing due to agential separability. Thus, the “exteriority-within” brings back into discussion the translational relationship between matter and discourse. However, our relationship with the world around us should no longer be seen as a relationship of simple representation (from the perspective of a homo depictor), but rather as one of performing in interaction with the agential character of matter. Diffraction patterns, for example, illuminate the indefinite nature of boundaries that perform a continuous action with which we, as spectators, interact, but from the perspective of what appears to us depending on how we throw our senses beyond the other side of things.

The exhibition from Borderline Art Space should have opened simultaneously, in the mirror (on the evening of November 6, 2020) with the exhibition from Center Photographique Marseille, “Déplacer l’horizon”, part of Manifesta 13 Biennial (Les Parallèles du Sud), where Sari Palosaari should have exhibited an intersectional sequence, inter-referential with the exhibition in Iași. Due to the pandemic situation in France, the exhibition in Marseille was postponed until January 2021, thus capturing us in an agential interior of the exteriority of the event.

The video experiments presented in the exhibition (in the order of entry into space): “Slicing”, “Exteriority within – Twin Trees”, “Surfacing”.