online catalogue
Press:
A correction of the norm, in Art Rotterdam article, March 2025
22.03.2025 - 20.04.2025
Opening Saturday March 22nd from 5 - 8 pm
For his debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Benjamin Francis sought to create a space filled with windows, fences, and thresholds that function as both portals to another realm and barriers that exclude. They are more than mere architectural forms; they embody the contradictions of boundaries, shaping access while simultaneously denying it.
A Foot Between the Door is an act of staking a claim. Literally translated from a Dutch saying, it is used to assert presence in spaces that exclude, whether through physical barriers or institutional structures. It stands for the negotiation required to inhabit and navigate spaces where identity is regulated, challenged or contested.
A work that pauses the visitor upon entering the exhibition space is The Smell of Boundaries (2025), a large-scale installation that explores the visceral, almost instinctual response one has to dirt and cleanliness. Dirt is something one is conditioned to be repulsed by, not necessarily through rational understanding, but through deep-seated social and biological instincts. Cleanliness is more than hygiene; it is a ritual that purifies a space, setting it apart from dirt and contamination. This distinction is not only physical but also symbolic.
In The Right to Opacity, the writer and poet Édouard Glissant rejects rigid borders, seeing them as fluid and liminal spaces of exchange. The Smell of Boundaries (2025) echoes this idea, where decay defies containment, seeping through divisions. Dirt, sweat, and rot reveal a hidden truth: borders are not just seen or felt but inhaled and carried within us.
Francis plays with transparency and opacity and befouls his works with greasy fingerprints, petroleum jelly, mold-like overgrowth, dead branches and fish eyes; materials that clash with the sterile, hyper-regulated confinements that hold them. They expose the tension between organic chaos and imposed order and act as metaphors for bodies existing outside the norm, resisting erasure in certain settings.
Incorporating these ideas, the exhibition does not seek to collapse borders but to animate them, making supposedly neutral objects more alive. What happens when that which should remain outside begins to infiltrate windows, walls, and doorways? A Foot Between the Door challenges the audience to confront these borderlands: between inside and outside, purity and contamination, life and decay. Francis transforms the space into a site of tension and negotiation, and invites us to rethink the politics of exclusion and belonging.
Benjamin Francis (b. 1996, SR&NL) graduated from the Fine Arts programme at ArtEZ BEAR, University of the Arts with Base for Experiment, Art, and Research, in Arnhem in 2020. As a multidisciplinary artist, Francis combines installative object-based work with experimental and participatory performances. Within his practice, he reflects on his lived experience of being corrected for spelling mistakes, due to dyslexia. These dissonances or errors are carefully corrected in our current-day society, as anything outside the norm is deemed unproductive and therefore excluded.
Both in his performances and object-based works, the audience is placed in unexpected situations, thus becoming a part of the artwork. Through this interactive process, Francis aims to challenge the dichotomy between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and undermine dominant systems of knowledge. As a result, he seeks to expose the hidden dynamics of power structures. Key questions within his practice consider what such systems are rooted in and who is in the position to dictate them. As such, the recurring themes in Francis’ work include dirt, cleanliness, pedagogy, discipline, authority, and power relations.
Francis often starts from ‘the other’ — (marginalized) bodies that are more heavily subjected to the normative workings of society. He draws from his own experience of being constantly corrected which created a tense relationship with authority figures, such as teachers. The tension between the normative society and his position as a queer person of color is an underlying tendency that intensifies this experience. The ‘cleaning up’ of mistakes, decay, and the dissection of something (both physically and verbally) is — in Francis’ view — what art is fundamentally about.
Since graduating from ArtEZ BEAR, Benjamin has shown at No Man’s Art Gallery, NL; Christine König Galerie, AU; Art Antwerp, BE; Luther Museum, NL; PuntWG, NL; Ballroom Project #6, BE; Hotel Maria Kapel, NL; If I Can’t Dance, Kunsthuis Syb, Het HEM, P/////AKT, NL; W139, NL; MÉLANGE, DE; Rencontres internationales, DE; SECONDroom, BE; and Mutter, NL, amongst others.
Photos Neeltje de Vries