Ageless, Ageless: Unfinished Is Not the Same as Abandoned
with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jochen Lempert, and Melvin Moti

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Curated by Shimmer
Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma

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5 July to 30 August 2026

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Opening reception:
Sunday, 5 July, 17:00 to 21:00

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Listening session by Melvin Moti, 17:30 to 18:00
Curator’s introduction, 18:00 to 18:30

 

Unfinished Is Not the Same as Abandoned is an exhibition chapter of Ageless, Ageless, Shimmer’s expansive multi-year study of cultural phenomena that connect us across time and space.

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In response to the context of STORAGE, Bangkok, an art space in a former printing house that specialised in Buddhist texts, the exhibition begins with “Untitled”, 1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. This work enacts rhythm, multiplicity, and the dispersal of material into the world. We are drawn to the paper stack because of its shifting, changing mass, as well as Gonzalez-Torres’s instruction to choose a blue. He once said, “For me, if a beautiful memory could have a color, that color would be light blue.”

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For some time, we pondered why blue, what makes it a beautiful memory? Then we were reminded of Melvin Moti’s work Miamilism, from 2010. A faded and framed LIFE magazine cover from July 1967, featuring Mia Farrow, has been exposed to sunlight by the artist. The ink of the headlines, which refer to Cold War power, revolutionary violence, psychedelic perception, and body ritual, has faded into the background, leaving only the cyan of Farrow’s eyes piercing through space. We are inspired by the idea that, in a life of transience, uncertainty, and impermanence, we can rely on beautiful memories to inform the future.

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We are not only concerned with Mia’s eyes themselves, but with the cyan ink, which relies on a negative trace to appear on the surface of the paper. That trace, that tired surface, here today, slowly gone tomorrow.

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Gone tomorrow is deeply embedded in Jochen Lempert’s work. Presented here are two images, both featuring what appear to be two bicycles photographed 15 years apart. Small beetles cluster on a gear shifter; in the other image, a lepidopteran in flight centres itself in the frame. Seasonality shifts us into movement. As you might remember, the flight of a lepidopteran is an invitation for us, as children, to chase and leap up high. Schmetterling! ผีเสื้อ! Butterfly! With giggles that fall back into nature, and into that space at STORAGE too, where the windows are left open and Bangkok comes in: her bugs, her emeralds, rubies, sapphires, her polished beetles as lures for us to move outwards, over borders, into both memory and future.

 

All the works in this show are in precarious states of change. Unfinished is not the same as abandoned. Unfinished means we are bound into a relationship with change. “Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,” Rilke told us. “The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate, in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.” That blue memory, the last hue to fade, that invitation to move.

 

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES
November 26, 1957 to January 9, 1996

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995, after attending university in Puerto Rico. Gonzalez-Torres’s practice incorporates a minimalist visual vocabulary, with certain artworks composed of everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, paired wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies.

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Gonzalez-Torres is known for making significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His practice continues to influence, and be influenced by, present-day cultural discourses. Gonzalez-Torres’s first institutional solo exhibition was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1988). Other major solo presentations of Gonzalez-Torres’s work during his lifetime included Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (1995), which traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1995), under the exhibition title Felix Gonzalez-Torres (A Possible Landscape); and to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1996), under the exhibition title Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Girlfriend in a Coma); and the three-venue exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling, presented at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA; and The Renaissance Society at theUniversity of Chicago, Chicago, USA (1994).

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Gonzalez-Torres is only one of two artists to have posthumously represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 2007.  A significant solo exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres's work is currently at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain through October 12, 2026.  Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami in 1996 from an AIDS-related illness.

 

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JOCHEN LEMPERT
1958

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Jochen Lempert studied biology. Between 1979 and 1989, he was a member of the experimental film group Schmelzdahin, which explored the combination of chemical processes and celluloid film. After this fruitful collaboration, he began to work photographically and has been researching the dialogue between nature and humankind since the 1990s. He has received numerous awards for his photographic work, including the Scholarship for Contemporary German Photography from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation in 1993 and the Camera Austria Prize for Contemporary Photography in 2017. Jochen Lempert has exhibited at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2010; the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2013; the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2017; the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry, Le Crédac, and the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, both in 2020; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, in 2022, among others.

 

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MELVIN MOTI
1977

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Having made film installations, artist books and feature films since graduating from De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2001, Moti’s practice has been reshaped to coincide with living in proximity to illness. In recent years he produced an animation film with orchestral music, parts of which will be presented at Storage as a listening session. Moti’s work has been shown both locally and internationally.

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Courtesy of the artist. Supported by Mondriaan Fonds.

 

 

 

 

 

ARTWORK LIST

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FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES
“Untitled”
1991

Print on paper, endless copies

3 1/4 inches at ideal height x 11 x 8 1/2 inches (, original paper size)

Edition of 1, 1 AP

Courtesy of Collection of Alejandra Rios and Mercedes Saenz, Mexico City

 

JOCHEN LEMPERT
“Ohne Titel (Harmonia, Hamburg, 2005)”
2005

Silver gelatin print

37.2 x 24.7 cm

Edition of 5

 

“Ohne Titel”
2020

Silver gelatin print

29.7 x 23.3 cm

Edition of 5

Courtesy of BQ, Berlin

 

MELVIN MOTI
Miamilism
2010

Paper, magazine

35 x 43 cm, framed

Edition of 3

Courtesy of the artist

 

 

ABOUT AGELESS, AGELESS

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Through his study of images, the historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) coined the term Pathosformel, which he defined as “charged visual figures”: specific gestures, postures, or expressions that recur across time. Warburg noticed that these visual figures return to us as concentrated signals of suffering, fear, or ecstasy: motifs that operate as sites where cultural memory stores and releases its accumulated force.

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Shimmer’s new programme, Ageless, Ageless, is centred on these signals: shared cultural forms such as the lullaby’s pulse, call-and-response, the ritual of the threshold, or the cadence of mourning. Travelling across geographies, languages, politics, and belief, these hazy forms flash up to the surface, letting us observe what repeats and what changes. By holding these patterns momentarily in view, slowly and together with you, our audience, we intend to make a space where differences can meet without hardening.

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“Ageless, Ageless” is a repeated lyric from “Mojo Pin” (1994) by Jeff Buckley (1966–1997), an artist inspired by devotional music, and in particular by the work of the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–1997). Like Khan and Buckley, this programme connects with repetition, where meaning melts away to connect us back to the deep. For us, agelessness is distinct from timelessness: it folds the past into the present in order to imagine the future anew.

 

Ageless, Ageless proposes artworks, exhibitions, writings, and collective studies that treat memory and presence as forms of continuity: not to rhyme with or repeat the past, but to remain continually informed by it.

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ABOUT SHIMMER

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Founded in 2018 by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma, SHIMMER has evolved into a hybrid cultural platform working across exhibitions, publishing, pedagogy, and institutional advising. We work in the space between micro-artist-run initiatives and larger institutional centres, allowing us to remain agile and rigorous, speculative yet structurally sound.

 

Shimmer’s style of curating moves like water: unfixed, in motion. We understand the exhibition as a choreographic score, where, through shifting rhythms, registers, and movements, artworks overlap, and ideas and generations cross over. The format of our exhibition unfolds over time, opening up and crossing conceptual, spatial, and temporal borders. We are amidst times of profound environmental, global, and mechanical change, where we need all the knowledge and crossovers we can get our hands on. On our horizon are radical shifts in what and how we mean to each other, how we come together, and how we share. With this in mind, we curate to reconsider the past, shape the future, and better accommodate us in the present. We do not confine a history, a practice, a thought, or an audience to particular categories, but give us all as much room as possible to draw alliances with artworks and each other.

 

Shimmer has worked with artists such as Heman Chong, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Fougeirol, Ellen Gallagher, Fernanda Gomes, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mike Kelley, Lee Kit, Jochen Lempert, Liz Magor, Melvin Moti, Charlotte Posenenske, Maaike Schoorel, Cally Spooner, and Lawrence Weiner.

 

 

Acknowledgement:

Special thanks to Mondriaan Fonds, The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Alejandra Rios and Mercedes Saenz (Mexico City), BQ
(Berlin), Bangkok CityCity Gallery

STORAGE programme is supported by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture (Fiscal Year 2026)

Photo: Atelier 247