online catalogue
Press:
Exhibition highlight on saliva.live, March 2025
A correction of the norm, in Art Rotterdam article, March 2025
22.03.2025 - 27.04.2025
Opening Saturday March 22nd from 5 - 8 pm
For his debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Benjamin Francis sought to create a space filled with windows, fences, and thresholds that function as both portals to another realm and barriers that exclude. They are more than mere architectural forms; they embody the contradictions of boundaries, shaping access while simultaneously denying it.
A Foot Between the Door is an act of staking a claim. Literally translated from a Dutch saying, it is used to assert presence in spaces that exclude, whether through physical barriers or institutional structures. It stands for the negotiation required to inhabit and navigate spaces where identity is regulated, challenged or contested.
A work that pauses the visitor upon entering the exhibition space is The Smell of Boundaries (2025), a large-scale installation that explores the visceral, almost instinctual response one has to dirt and cleanliness. Dirt is something one is conditioned to be repulsed by, not necessarily through rational understanding, but through deep-seated social and biological instincts. Cleanliness is more than hygiene; it is a ritual that purifies a space, setting it apart from dirt and contamination. This distinction is not only physical but also symbolic.
In The Right to Opacity, the writer and poet Édouard Glissant rejects rigid borders, seeing them as fluid and liminal spaces of exchange. The Smell of Boundaries (2025) echoes this idea, where decay defies containment, seeping through divisions. Dirt, sweat, and rot reveal a hidden truth: borders are not just seen or felt but inhaled and carried within us.
Francis plays with transparency and opacity and befouls his works with greasy fingerprints, petroleum jelly, mold-like overgrowth, dead branches and fish eyes; materials that clash with the sterile, hyper-regulated confinements that hold them. They expose the tension between organic chaos and imposed order and act as metaphors for bodies existing outside the norm, resisting erasure in certain settings.
Incorporating these ideas, the exhibition does not seek to collapse borders but to animate them, making supposedly neutral objects more alive. What happens when that which should remain outside begins to infiltrate windows, walls, and doorways? A Foot Between the Door challenges the audience to confront these borderlands: between inside and outside, purity and contamination, life and decay. Francis transforms the space into a site of tension and negotiation, and invites us to rethink the politics of exclusion and belonging.
A foot between the door, solo exhibition by Benjamin Francis at No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam, 2025. Images by Neeltje de Vries.
A foot between the door, solo exhibition by Benjamin Francis at No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam, 2025. Images by Django van Ardenne.