For MiArt 2024 No Time No Space, ADZ presents a booth that turns speculatively on stillness and its limitations. Joanne Burke and Tali Levi are two artists whose practices are technically disparate, but whose works coalesce around shades of permanence.

Joanne Burke develops sculptures from an ancient technique known as water divination, casting molten wax into temperature controlled water to produce wrought, elaborate casts. The artist considers these sculptures to take the imprint of the water, transforming the fluid into the static and capturing chance postures, much like surrealist grattage. The resultant pieces, modified further through considered melting and warping, are then cast in silver and bronze to create metallic medallions, solidifying the ephemeral. Recalling medieval practices of divination, the works take on a unique temporality - at once, an imprint of a unique moment in time, yet also taking on prophetic weight.

In Tali Levi’s work, the artist uses a unique painterly application to create alchemical compositions, turning centrally on the interplay of constraint and liberty, design and the incidental. Trained formally as a photographer, the works conceptually expand the process of developing film in a darkroom, extending the moment in which a static image is formed from an interplay of chemicals. Considered as such, Levi’s works delight in their transience, offering an alternate approach to finality. Levi’s paintings offer a symbolic correlative to Roland Barthes’ concept of the photographic punctum - the incidental but precise moment that an image captures. Here, Levi reimagines the punctum as terminally impermanent.

In a contemporary present that places increasing weight on speed, immediacy, and instantaneous, globalised reach, the collective works present stillness as a spiritual antidote. Like a fractal, whose complexity increases with more detailed study, the assembled artist’s approach to the still begets a cadence of permanence, reflecting on alternate modes of preservation, pause, and inertia.