Form of Contingency and Pattern of Imminence by Gabriel Kuri combines photographs of emergency plans and cleaning charts with layered drawings, challenging the boundary between chaos and structure. Featuring Kuri's works and an essay by James Cahill, this book offers a profound exploration of inevitability, contingency, and the human need to organize the unpredictable.
For the past ten years, Gabriel Kuri has been photographing two kinds of display: emergency escape plans for buildings—hotels, museums, warehouses, etc.—and cleaning charts found in public washrooms. Both series have evolved in parallel, marking Kuri's movements around the world. Once weaved together, they constitute the backbone of Forms of Contingency and Patterns of Imminence.
The concepts of imminence and contingency seem oppositional at first, something that will occur versus something that may never happen. But through Kuri's apparently casual yet persistent visual recording of plans and charts, such contrast is put into question. A third element amplifies this posture: a series of black ink drawings printed on transparent paper, then superimposed on both sets of photographs. The artist's presence—his active role in witnessing and documenting—is extended to these sketches made in response to each set of photographs. As with drawing exercises, these marks are made blindly, concentrating on the dates, times, initials, names, and geometric shapes. As such, the artist's mapping reflects and, at the same time, dismantles the contingency/imminence dualism, suggesting the inevitability of a certain amount of chaos even in the most formal, most detailed of human efforts to plan and structure.
A text by British writer and critic James Cahill completes the book. Sprouting from an in-depth conversation with Kuri and somehow mimicking his conceptual stands on form and content, Cahill's contribution is both a detailed analysis of the overall project and a lyrical journey through the artist's mind.
Inspired by a wide range of cultural, political, and economic fields that seek to predict, analyze, and manage the future, the practice of the Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri (born 1970 in Mexico City) approaches sculpture as a potential reflection of the relationships between the rational and affective realms. Simultaneously employing formal and poetic juxtapositions of quotidian materials, images and hybrid objects, Kuri delves into the interstices of contemporary culture where behavior and speculative ideas interact to forge our understanding of often contradictory values of our time. The future manifests in his practice as a deferral of the present rather than imagination of what is to come. By rethinking the mundane and the systems that order, the artist opens up the potential for transformation inherent in familiar situations when observed from unconventional angle.
