OBTUSE (°)

OBTUSE (°), the first exhibition by Obtuse Archive, brings together thirteen artists alongside three performers working across painting, sculpture, installation, sound, performance, and food. Taking its title from the angle that sits between 90° and 180°, the exhibition uses this spatial relation as a metaphor for the space amid standing and extending, where a form begins to tilt beyond its own balance.

If a right angle (90°) is articulated, stabilising, and finite—the edge of a frame, the junction of walls, the point where structure finds rest—then an obtuse angle marks another order of relation. It stretches too far to be stable, yet not far enough to be straight. One hundred and eighty degrees is the flat line, the horizon, the absolute opposite, where everything folds into reversal and symmetry. Obtuse sits in the unsettled zone across these two poles: wider than structure, shy of resolution. It is the posture of hesitation, of drift, of leaning without ever arriving.

Within the exhibition, this condition is articulated through material tension, bodily presence, and acts of transformation. Works appear suspended between states: organic and synthetic, intimate and infrastructural, decorative and unsettling. Objects lean, bind, fracture, or accumulate; surfaces are glazed, coated, stitched, or cast; gestures repeat with variation rather than conclusion. Each work proposes its own angle of entry, its own degree of resistance or drift.

Rather than forming a unified statement, the exhibition unfolds as a choreography of partial alignments. Relationships emerge through proximity and co-presence, rather than thematic consensus. Sound, performance, and food extend this logic into time and encounter, activating the space as something lived and contingent rather than fixed.

As the inaugural exhibition of Obtuse Archive, OBTUSE (°) reflects the archive’s broader interest in practices that linger, misalign, or refuse disappearance. It proposes obliqueness as a way of thinking and sensing: to look, listen, and gather from an angle that unsettles inherited structures of order, allowing meaning to remain productively unresolved.

‍