Ethan Assouline – Poppies

Gauli Zitter presents ETHAN ASSOULINE’s first solo exhibition in Belgium. Her work unfolds through sculpture, installation, writing, publishing, drawing, and the organization of collective moments around reading and writing. For this exhibition, Assouline has created a series of new works using various mediums, techniques and ideas, often incorporating elements from a past preparatory period in and around the exhibition space. Assouline takes a critical approach to architecture, neoliberal strategies, and language, examining their relationship to time, money, human interactions, and bodies. It explores how policies promoting positivity mask the social and political problems of modern cities, presenting a joy performed by current ideologies to normalize power relations and maintain the status quo.
One of the themes of the exhibition is childhood, used to question contemporary urban ideology. Children are often seen as future adults, empty recipients of the dominant narratives. By integrating design objects, toys and architectural elements for children into her works, Assouline reverses this expectation of innocence, posing the child as a potential key to revealing the limits of modern urban politics. At the same time, children’s construction of imaginary worlds – using blocks, curtains and other toys – dialogues with the real built environment around us.
The title of the exhibition, Poppies, refers to a recent obsession of Assouline’s. Poppies are generally unplanned plants, escaping human control. They can also be seen as opportunities for happiness for the urban or suburban passer-by who discovers them. Assouline’s works attempt to see how symbols like the poppy and other urban elements can mean something different from what is commonly planned or given, offering a critical look at what is supposed to be ignored.