Edith Dekyndt - The Origin of Things

After Bertrand Lavier and Anri Sala, Edith Dekyndt has taken over the twenty-four display cases in the Passage of the Bourse de Commerce. It became one of the most popular set-ups used at the world’s fairs, and in fact, the ones we see in the Passage were installed when the building was reconfigured from an old market hall to a stock exchange on the occasion of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Dekyndt explored this history when she constructed this project around the idea of creating images that represent “an apparition and a resurgence in motion”.

In this cycle of display cases, Edith Dekyndt both creates the conditions for the work to appear and questions how this comes about. The work is suspended between two natures (object and artwork) and two states (the readymade and the incomplete). The artist assembles and arranges these everyday objects or fragments of objects that have broken, fallen, been collected, recovered and repaired.