Taking its title from Bill Brown’s theory that follows Heidegger in delineating a difference between objects and things, the exhibition looks at seven distinctive practices that all consider the ontological status of things. 

Brown argues that when an object stops working for us it becomes a thing – it is released from its original function and begins an additional life. We then engage with its thingness. Where objects create subjects, things interfere with that subject-object relation. 

Various conceptual frameworks, such as animism, object oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and other technological and spiritual turns, have led to an increasingly popular interest in the interconnectedness of all things, a rejection of anthropocentrism, and the acknowledgment of a more expansive notion of consciousness in non-human and inanimate entities. 

The works in this show speak to the mutability of objects and interrogate both the power and fetishisation of things as they pass through different semantic contexts.