AMSTERDAM.- To See the Inability to See — a collective that formed at de Appel's Archive in 2019 — is known for their collectively written texts and their performative readings of a series of temporarily made triangular books. In 2022 and 2023 they developed a foldable multidirectional book/object called My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon: A Porous Reader to Unguard the Garden. This publication has sculptural and performative qualities, stressing the relationship between bodies and books; provoking collectivity in writing, reading and thinking. It has been developed in close conversation with its designer, Elisabeth Klement, who joined their collective process by designing the book parallel to the development of its content. The book/object has now unfolded into the exhibition My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon — a repertoire of objects, gestures and events that expands its content into the space and in relation to other bodies, such as those of readers, visitors and artworks. This unfolding takes place on a flexible sculpture display that also holds a selection of works, weaving the publication, the artworks and the artifacts into an inter-related constellation of physical and spatial experiences.

To See the Inability to See’s collective writing rises from an effort to open up spaces, question borders and establish new connections between objects and stories. In My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon the artists look into power structures related to conventional forms of archiving and collecting. They see this archiving as a state of mind that we all experience on a daily basis: clinging to ‘the known’ and resisting change, ‘the unknown’, or the uncategorisable. For this publication the collective departed from (fictional) stories surrounding certain traditional Iranian buildings, such as the Persian garden called Fin Garden in Kashan, and in particular an octagonal vestibule called the hashti. The women-led uprising in Iran in 2022, triggered secret correspondences between the members of the collective, that turned out to have a big influence on the content of the book.

The exhibition encompasses different realms. One consists of artworks by the individual members of the collective developed alongside and parallel to the process of writing. A second realm includes historical objects from personal collections that are related to the content of the publication. A third realm comprises other artists’ works referenced in, or connected to the book. A fourth direction draws connections between the content of My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon and de Appel's Archive, as it is from this archive that To See the Inability to See first started writing on visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion in archiving practices. The title is a direct quote from Derek Jarman, referring to his fenceless garden at Dungeness.

Featured in the show are works by Arefeh Riahi, Martín La Roche Contreras, Maartje Fliervoet, Kader Attia, Kasra Jalilipour and Seba Calfuqueo, as well as a selection of historical objects.

During the exhibition there will be a public programme with film and video screenings by Derek Jarman, Kasra Jalilipour, Marcela Moraga and more titles to be announced, and performative readings with dash (-) collective, Constanza Mendoza, Giles Bailey, Lara Khaldi and Francisca Khamis Giacoman. The screenings are organised in collaboration with Kriterion.