Two raindrops fall onto water. The apparent order is immediately set in motion by the impact. Waves and patterns of interference emerge, gradually changing with time. For a short while, the water ripples outwards in perfect, concentric circles that become fainter and fainter the further they spread. The ripples continue dispersing the impact energy until the water appears to return to its original state. The surface gravitates back to its diffuse balance, bouncing off the edges of the piece as though from the sides of a basin.

Alicja Kwade’s new series, ENTROPIE reconstructs this process in snapshots. Like many of her works, ENTROPIE questions our very modes of perception. Its representations reveal that the apparent order was actually already in a state of entropy from the beginning – ‘entropy’ being the physical measure of disorder or, more accurately, the ‘absence of order’. In ENTROPIE, watch hands on paper represent the arrangement of the molecules. At any other point in time, these could also be arranged differently, as micro-conditions occur in almost infinite possible variations. Yet still randomness does not prevail. Far more, each work is located in a clearly stated point in time. The entropy steadily increases, imposing its direction on time.

The same toposes of the contingency, conditionality and constructedness of our perceptions also appear in other works in this exhibition. Realities run in parallel, states are unstable, and arbitrary settlements often determine our experience of the world. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in works such as EIN JAHR (2023) or EIN MONAT (July 2020), where the number of hours in the stated period is visualised by a sequence of watch hands. For the observer, discovering a signified amid the forest of hands is nigh-on impossible; instead, their attention is inexorably drawn to the countless signifiers and ultimately to the unit of time measurement itself. In these unfurled moments, time seems to stand still, and the repetitive, rhythmic waves of the watch hands show just how arbitrary and coincidental the division of time into hours and minutes ultimately is, and how starkly this settlement determines our experience of reality.