At Le Parvis in Ibos, Danish artist Frederik Exner stages Door of Hearing on the Greenwich meridian: nine foam frogs with disc-halos, five Chest effigies and a six-metre needle that tells no time.
The site-specificity is given, not manufactured. Ibos sits on the Greenwich meridian — Exner's Untitled (nail), 600 centimetres of epoxy clay lying on the floor, is calibrated to that line. The gnomon whose cast shadow marks the apparent march of the sun, "and thus the course of a time that Exner sets out to unsettle," as the curatorial text puts it. A temporal axis that the building happens to sit on, now made visible and horizontal, now stripped of its function as an instrument. The needle tells no time.
The nine frog-figures that constitute Ansekt (2025) carry the burden the press release assigns them with complete seriousness: the frog as totem of a sinking world, the maligned creature of fairy-tale and legend repurposed as a ruin-witness. More than 41 percent of amphibian species in France are currently threatened. The sculptural frogs are PU-foam, acrylic resin, anodized aluminium — synthetic materials made to carry the weight of devotional or architectural forms. The disc-halos and metal plinths complete the liturgical register without providing its content.
The five Chest works — standing 2 metres tall, titled as both chest and coffer — introduce a further anthropomorphic dimension. Each is a different material combination: PU-foam and shellac for one, epoxy clay and silicone for another, acrylic resin and pencil for a third. The variations within a single formal type produce something closer to a series of statements than a series of repetitions. On the floor, Bells — some twenty red silicone-cast bells — refuses its instrumental and sacred function, becoming, in the curator's phrase, "an autonomous work sufficient unto itself."
The press release that curated this exhibition, written by Magali Gentet, describes Exner working "sans but, ni message" — without aim or message — against the current of self-centred, hyper-relational societies. "The artist effaces himself to let the work take place, accepting that the work, agentive, imposes its own law on him." What the work produces in the immaculate space of Le Parvis is what it calls a "sedimented, alternative time": not the past, not the present, not the future, but something prior to all three distinctions, haunted by medievalist memory and populated by creatures whose time on earth is running out.
