Split Hairs

Kyle Alden Martens, a Montréal-based artist originally from Saskatchewan, continues an ongoing exploration of queer subjectivities and the forms that they take, while experimenting with new scales and temporalities. Fabric, leather and couture are used as a visual vocabulary for the bodies that are created, interpreted and projected at Diagonale. Split Hairs is an installation made up of suspended sculptures whose scope breaks with the discrete economy of earlier works. Where earlier iterations assumed a human dimension or smaller, here the viewer is confronted with structures that dominate the space and the body. Their imposing presence is more than just visual; it operates an ontological shift in which the imbalance of scale becomes a site of implicit politicization, as Martens reimagines traditionally fixed identities as moving trajectories. The theoretician José Esteban Muñoz would describe this as ‘the insistence of the future in the present’ – an expression of the future performed by minoritized communities, not just as a utopic prediction, but as an image of a concrete vibration already perceptible in contemporary gestures and materialities. The works are at once anchored in the present and stretched towards a queer timeframe that refuses normative continuity. Hanging in a row on long metal frames, jackets with exposed stitching and boots with soles occasionally turned up invite the viewer to the heart of the creative process in a game of ‘hide and show’. But the intention is more than just to render visible; these mechanisms extend the thought process by adding repetition to the rejection of chrononormativity [1]. Scissors, thimbles and deliberately opaque watches are placed here and there like signs of a fleeting temporal order. In interfering with the very instruments that measure time and repeating the elements that make up Split Hairs, the artist infers not a suspension, but rather a disarticulation. Time is no longer the invisible framework on which the pieces are constructed – it has become a contentious, variable and dissident substance that fractures linearity and produces rhythms that no longer respond to the reproductive, social and economic imperatives of a predetermined existence. This temporality become matter was nourished by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which the artist read while producing the exhibition. This major 20th century modernist author portrays an eponymous protagonist who passes through epochs, by turns borrowing traditionally ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ traits along the way. The novel should not, however, be seen as a simple literary reference but almost as an infrastructural model in which the subject moves through gender norms in the way we might move through environments. It acts as a sort of protocol for reading the work that enables us to understand the way that Martens manipulates materials to explore a fluid subjectivity and open more widely to another becoming, mindful of the tensions between the body, the narrative, and temporality. ..... [1] A concept originated by the author Elizabeth Freeman according to which existence follows a predictable and linear trajectory.