Cabinet of Curiosities

At SILK, we have found ourselves returning to this question:

Where does an artwork actually live today?

For many of the artists we work with, there is no single answer. A work may first appear on a laptop in an artist's studio, circulate through social media, find its way onto a collector's screen and later occupy an exhibition space at architectural scale. An image can become sculptural, projected on a large building; an animation can become an installation with multi-channel screens you can walk along, a digital composition can continue through a physical edition, or in a book; a generative system can send instructions to a plotter that draws directly onto paper or to a tufting machine; or a 3D-model can be cast in bronze.

For us, these different manifestations belong to the same artistic life, and we have started calling this way of thinking UNCONTAINED.

This word emerged from conversations about the artists around us and the difficulty of describing their practices through the medium categories that have structured much of art history. Painting, sculpture, photography and film still give us valuable ways of understanding how artworks are made. At the same time, many contemporary practices move easily across them. Digital production has accelerated that movement and given artists a studio in which image, motion, sound and three-dimensional form can exist remarkably close to one another, and we are interested to see what happens once you follow that movement.

UNCONTAINED has therefore developed into a wider curatorial framework for SILK: a way of looking that encourages us to stay close to an artistic idea as it changes form, and to consider how those different forms can strengthen one another. It also reflects something we increasingly recognise in contemporary culture itself: images live mobile lives. They travel, gather associations, are (re)shared, enter new spaces, shown on different screens and in multiple settings, scaled, and edited.

This September, we will bring the UNCONTAINED thinking to Contemporary Istanbul through a solo presentation with Frédéric Duquette, better known as Fvckrender.

Within the Cabinet of Curiosities, our wider curatorial framework will be shown through an artist whose practice already moves naturally between rendered images, moving image, sculpture and physical editions.

A little history on containment

The human urge to organise the world

Long before digital networks, people were already developing systems through which to organise and understand the objects around them. Art history is full of these containers. There is the frame around the painting and the pedestal beneath the sculpture, and there are larger conceptual containers like schools, periods, media and movements through which works become understandable in relation to one another. These structures have played an important role in how art has been studied, collected, preserved, and shown. Museums themselves depend upon systems of classification: collections are divided into departments, objects are catalogued, dates are established, and connections are drawn across time. Art history is, in some sense, an ongoing attempt to create an order through which an enormous number of images and objects can be read.

But several centuries before the modern museum took its current shape, European collectors approached that impulse somewhat differently. From the Renaissance onwards, cabinets of curiosities – often called Wunderkammern, or chambers of wonder – brought together objects whose relationships could be speculative, poetic, scientific, or simply aesthetic. A shell might sit near an astronomical instrument and a drawing could share a cabinet with coral or minerals. Natural history and craftsmanship occupied the same room.

Looking at these collections now, there is something fascinating about their state of suspension: categories were still taking shape and the borders between art and science, or natural discoveries were so fluid that a collection became a way of thinking through the world itself.

The cabinet of curiosities also belongs to a complicated history of exploration, trade, wealth and European collecting, with objects often arriving through networks shaped by radically unequal forms of access and power. At the same time, these collections reveal a period in which systems of classification were visibly still being constructed. Objects could occupy the same space before their disciplines had fully settled around them.

And right now, we are once again surrounded by objects and images whose categories feel provisional. Like said, a sculpture can originate entirely within software, a photograph can contain elements that were never physically in front of a camera, a generative system can produce an ongoing body of images, and a moving image can fill the side of a building and temporarily become architecture.

The vocabulary through which we understand these works is therefore developing alongside the works themselves. Fvckrender’s practice sits directly within this shifting territory: a flower can begin as a digitally modelled form, appear in motion on a screen and later acquire weight and surface as a physical sculpture. The motif remains recognisable while its material conditions keep changing.

Following the image

In our current day and age, the screen has become one of the most influential cultural surfaces of our time, and digitally native artists understand its peculiarities intuitively. They work with luminosity, looping, scale and movement. They understand how an image behaves when it is viewed on a phone and what happens when that same image suddenly becomes several metres wide. Their visual decisions are informed by software and by the interfaces through which their work is produced and encountered.

But then, when a digitally conceived form is fabricated in chrome, for example, something curious happens. The object carries traces of the environment in which it was first imagined: an improbable smoothness, a particular relationship with light, a curve that was easy to construct in 3D software and far more complicated to manufacture in physical space, but it also comes with a whole new experience of the artwork. The same movement can happen in the opposite direction: a material surface can be scanned, rendered or animated, gaining another temporal and spatial existence through the screen. Going beyond the first set of borders thus liberates the parameters, and can enrich the artist’s first concept.

This back-and-forth interests us enormously because it makes the origin stories increasingly fascinating, where artworks develop through translation. Each manifestation can reveal something that remained less visible in the previous one.

Following an image like that also changes the way we think about curating. Selecting a finished object for an exhibition is one part of the work, but with digitally native practices we are often involved in thinking with an artist about how an idea can enter the world in several ways and which of those possibilities makes sense at a particular moment.

A cabinet for Fvckrender

Fvckrender's practice offers an especially clear way of exploring these ideas.

Over the past decade, Frédéric has developed a visual language built around recurring forms that many people now recognise immediately: flowers, chains, reflective surfaces and organic structures. Within his rendered worlds, these motifs can feel strangely familiar and slightly impossible at the same time.

Flowers are rendered with the polish of chrome, with stems curled into forms that resemble jewellery; and chains move through dreamlike spaces. What interests us in Istanbul is the possibility of allowing these forms to exist together across several states.

At the centre of the booth will be a large moving-image work presented on LED, creating an environment of shifting botanical and reflective forms. Around it, sculptural works will bring elements of Fvckrender's visual world into physical space, alongside prints and editions that isolate particular images and specimens.

The current presentation also extends his visual vocabulary through shells, fish and other forms drawn from nature. Seen together, they begin to resemble a collection whose taxonomy is still being formed, which is where the cabinet of curiosities became such a useful way of thinking about the booth.

They can also be read as a contemporary form of still life. Flowers, shells and other collected objects have appeared within still-life traditions for centuries, fixing particular arrangements in time. Fvckrender’s versions remain in motion. They travel between moving image, sculpture, print and digital space, carrying fragments of his developing visual language with them. Each work becomes a kind of time capsule: it holds a moment from Fvckrender’s evolving world while remaining able to take another form later.

We can imagine Fvckrender's forms almost as specimens from a world that sits somewhere between the biological and the computational. They feel collected from nature, while their surfaces carry the unmistakable precision of rendering software. Their physical versions give permanence to forms that might previously have been encountered as light on a screen.

Visitors to Contemporary Istanbul will be able to move between the large digital environment and the sculptural objects surrounding it. The relationships between them are central to the exhibition: the moving image gives the forms a wider world to inhabit, while the sculptures allow individual elements from that world to take on light, weight, scale and surface. Each version changes the way we look at the others. Cabinet of Curiosities therefore becomes the first major physical expression of SILK’s wider UNCONTAINED framework.

Where an artwork can go

When SILK began, our attention was already moving across several places at once. The name of our event series, Silk Road, carries the idea of cultural movement in itself. The historical Silk Roads connected regions through the circulation of materials, images, technologies and ideas. Things changed as they travelled. A visual motif could arrive somewhere new and be absorbed into another local language; techniques were adopted and transformed through contact. That principle still feels relevant to us, even as the infrastructures through which culture travels have changed completely.

Today an image can cross the world in seconds. The more interesting part begins after that initial circulation: what happens when it arrives somewhere? Who encounters it? What context does it enter? What physical form might it acquire? What remains from that encounter several years later? These are questions we keep asking and UNCONTAINED gives us a way to think through them while remaining close to the artists themselves. It allows us to work with practices that develop across software and physical materials, across online circulation and exhibitions, and across the immediate life of an image and the slower process through which an artistic history takes shape. In that sense, every manifestation can also become a record of a particular moment in an artist’s practice, carrying part of that history forward as the work continues to change.

And overall, it encourages us to understand an artistic practice as something that keeps accumulating meaning through encounter and context. Therefore, the most important part of UNCONTAINED for us is to stay curious about where art can go.

In Istanbul, that curiosity takes the form of a cabinet: flowers, chains, shells and other symbols gathered around a luminous digital world, each carrying the trace of another version of itself. Together, they form a series of animated still lifes and time capsules, holding particular moments within Fvckrender’s evolving visual world as they continue through screens, materials and space.

Perhaps this is where UNCONTAINED becomes most tangible for us. An artwork can carry its own history forward while continuing to acquire new forms, contexts and encounters. Cabinet of Curiosities gives us one room in which to see that process unfold.