Things, Desires… A Christmas Selection by Hannah Gallery

Artist list

Kim Buck, Fumiko Gotô, Gésine Hackenberg, Esther Heite, Karin Johansson, Beppe Kessler, Otto Künzli, Gigi Mariani, Annelies Planteydt, Tore Svensson, Yoko Takirai and Pietro Pellitteri, Manon van Kouswijk

For Plato, we desire what we do not have, and the movement of desire is always directed toward an absent object that promises some form of fulfillment. For Spinoza, desire does not arise from lack, but from vital potency. It is the very impulse that makes us persevere in existence, the internal force that guides our actions and leads us to expand. For Freud, desire is an unconscious energy that seeks symbolic pathways through which to express itself. It does not speak directly, it appears disguised in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in objects charged with emotional meaning. For Walter Benjamin, desire acquires meaning only when it is not fully accessible, it is distance that generates aura and activates the experience of desire. For Jean Baudrillard, desire is not directed toward objects but toward signs. We do not desire things, we desire what they represent, values, imaginaries, social positions, narratives. For Georges Bataille, desire is excess, the human impulse toward what is useless yet necessary, a movement of energy that seeks intensity and transgression.

This diversity of perspectives reveals a common point: between the thing and desire there is a space where meaning is produced. There is no single theory that can contain it; there are many. The twelve pieces selected for Things, Desires… operate within this interval. They do not confirm a single definition of desire, but can activate several. They may function as signs, in Baudrillard’s sense; as zones of attention, in Benjamin’s terms, as ritualised excesses, in Bataille’s framework, or as devices of perception and intensified reality, as we often define within Hannah Gallery.

Each piece may be interpreted through one or several of these perspectives, or may generate new ones. The aim of the selection is not to propose a single thesis, but to show how a small, finite, material object can contain multiple ways of thinking about the relation between things and desires. These twelve pieces do not explain desire; they set it in motion.