The Mirror Effect: Seeing with Two Pairs of Eyes

 Courtesy photo Ashley Zelinskie and Lara Pan – Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art, Exhibition The Mirror Effect curated by Lara Pan, Works by Abdoulnasser Gharem, Jenny Holzer, Carlo Zanni, and Igor Simic on display

Otavio Schipper, who composes poetic systems of sound and science, and Nicolás Guagnini, whose practice often links politics and personal memory, deepen this room’s reflection on how structures shape lived experience. It is a brief but pivotal threshold that prepares the transition toward the systemic reflection of the next space.

The third room, almost neuronal in spirit, is the intellectual core. Arnold Dreyblatt activates and erases his data as if it were alive, Joseph Nechvatal introduces the virus as a metaphor of power, Ashley Zelinskie translates Kosuth’s chair into code, and Manfred Mohr makes his algorithmic cubes breathe. Especially striking is Edwin Schlossberg’s Conscious Alphabet, which invites us to rebuild language from its very atoms. The room vibrates like a brain in motion, a place where systems reveal themselves in constant mutation.

The final room, visionary in atmosphere, opens toward the future. Vera Molnár’s disciplined geometries, Sasha Stiles’ AI poetry, Ioana Vreme Moser’s liquid circuits, and Filip Kostic’s sarcophagus for an extinct computer evoke a time when code is alive, fragile, and mortal.

As I moved through the exhibition, I found myself tracing invisible lines and looking for the points where the constellation locks into place. The Mirror Effect is not merely a gathering of works. It arranges them like the gears of a delicate mechanism. Each room beats to its own rhythm, incisive, playful, neuronal, visionary, but together they produce a single shared breath. There is a structure here, precise and almost musical, in which each work occupies its place like a note in a score. That precision makes the exhibition function like an invisible choreography. There is no excess, no noise, only resonance.

Photo credit: Anne-Katherine Meeus - Chateau de Monsoreau Museum of the Contemporary Art, Exhibition The Mirror Effect curated by Lara Pan, still from Ericka Beckman’s perfomaritve film Reach Capacity (2020)

Photo credit: Anne-Katherine Meeus - Chateau de Monsoreau Museum of the Contemporary Art, Exhibition The Mirror Effect curated by Lara Pan, still from Ericka Beckman’s perfomaritve film Reach Capacity (2020)
 

Photo credit: Anne-Katherine Meeus - Chateau de Monsoreau Museum of the Contemporary Art, Exhibition The Mirror Effect curated by Lara Pan, On display « Arnulf Rainer » score by Peter Kubelka
 

Courtesy photo – Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art, Exhibition The Mirror Effect curated by Lara Pan, Artist Sasha Stiles - the Repetea an ongoing series that uses visual poetics, AI powered text and generative code

The importance of this exhibition lies not only in its celebration of a history but in the way it extends it. Since Harald Szeemann, the exhibition has been transformed into an autonomous medium of thought. It is no longer a simple inventory of works but a narrative in motion, a work in itself. The Mirror Effect belongs to this genealogy but adds a twist. It does not work with the archive as a frozen past but with active memory, with systems that continue to generate meaning in real time. It shows that conceptualism is not a closed chapter but a living method for thinking about art and the world.

This project proposes a curatorial model able to integrate memory and futurity, political critique and technological poetry, analytic thought and sensory resonance. It is not an encyclopedic exhibition but a constellational one, closer to a star chart than a catalogue raisonné. It invites us to read the present as a map of tensions, as if each work were a star illuminating a distinct coordinate of thought.

As I left the château, I felt that the mirror of the title had done its work. It had reflected not only the legacy of Art & Language but something more urgent, the certainty that exhibitions can still open a space of truth. A space where works think, where the viewer becomes implicated, where time briefly suspends and what once seemed theory becomes lived experience. WM

Christian Domínguez Dietzel (b. Berlin, 1965) is a curator, writer, and cultural producer whose career spans more than three decades across Europe and Latin America. He collaborated closely with Harald Szeemann on landmark exhibitions such as Visionary Switzerland, the Swiss Pavilion at Expo 92, and The Platform of Humanity at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Domín0guez served as Exhibition Coordinator at the Museo Reina Sofía (1996–98), Deputy Director of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (1998–2001), and cultural advisor to Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2001–04), where he oversaw an extensive international exhibition program.