07 Okt About a Square
Eric Emery
How much square meters does one need to open a gallery? For curator and visual artist, Eric Emery, 20 m² were exactly about right. ‘About a Square. Ten Years of site-specific exhibitions at zqm’ visualizes the transformative journey of a tiny exhibition space in Berlin named ‘zqm’. The acronym – meaning twenty square meters – stands for a dimensional pre-condition which was taken, from the very first exhibition by Leo ‘Kicking Over an Andy Goldworthy Sculpture’ – and ever since – as a possibility rather than a limitation. Graphic designer Julie Joliat got invited to continue the tradition of young artists to curatorial create something out of a white blank. Her Carte Blanche turned out to be an artwork itself. With page numbers dancing out of the line, wildly composed visual references, a long interview between Ascanio Cecco and Eric Emery, this book is an experimental laboratory, to which luckily, none of the standard norms of an exhibition catalogue can be applied. Nor does it foster conventional ways of thinking. In summary, it’s not the worst idea to survey your terrain in order to think out of the box – no matter how small it is.