Tanja Widmann & Johannes Porsch: Cell Project Space, London

“-1, plus One” – Beneath and Beyond the Sign of Authorship

Not every door opens to let you in. Sometimes it’s a reflective membrane, bouncing back a distorted echo of what you thought you’d left behind. As you cross the threshold into “-1, plus One,” Tanja Widmann’s first solo show in the UK, something disperses rather than begins. A barely audible industrial hum pulses at the entrance of Cell Project Space, a coded signal, a sonic loop that seeps in and expands. Conceived with Johannes Porsch, the exhibition operates as a threshold device: each work a passage, each gesture a deviation.

Spread across the lobby, office, and both front and back galleries over two floors, the exhibition functions like a rudimentary feedback system, where moving bodies trigger symbolic, affective, and temporal economies. Objects are not simply displayed but positioned as relational nodes: engraved steel cylinders, milled glass panes, prints on recycled paper, single-channel video loops. Everything in “-1, plus One” breathes the logic of montage, everyday materials overloaded with memory and desire. Nothing is shown as-is; everything is assembled, reiterated, withheld.

Hierarchies dissolve. Space turns into a field of tension between presence and absence. Glass panels leaning against the wall don’t divide rooms; they reflect them. Mirrors of meaning, they insert the viewer back into the system, making them complicit. Every work is a derivation, or derivative, of a conceptual matrix: the title itself, a stuttering arithmetic of minus and plus, evokes a grammar of cuts and supplements. Here, to produce is also to subtract.

The materials speak in the language of protocols: steel, perspex, office paper, audio. Works like “-1, One plus (Bit)” and “-1, One plus (Derivates)” unfold as operational scripts, fragmented, engraved, recombined in almost serial variations, each one singular. Prefabricated components, seals, clamps, printed panels, don’t dilute meaning; they concentrate it. The cliché, rather than a drain on originality, becomes preferred data: traces of ongoing exposure. Every surface doubles as a writing surface, newspaper pages collected in thick volumes become objects of persistent, suspended reading.

Video elements, as in “The Horse Fair,” suggest held and reprocessed memory: Rosa Bonheur, Megan Francis Sullivan, a Samsung Galaxy. A chain of citations and apparatuses that doesn’t historicize but stratifies, layer upon layer, breaking linearity. Subjectivity here emerges as difference, as interval, delay, recursion. It’s the labor of staying with a structure that shifts at every iteration.

Downstairs, near the office area, a single printed sheet, “Proposal,” “Protocol”, seems to wait for a reader’s action. But no instructions follow. This is choreography to be learned through movement. As the body navigates, the exhibition shifts in response. There’s no ending, only another threshold.

What lingers is the sheen of engraved metal, the weight of cheap printed paper, the vibration of a sound whose source remains untraceable. “-1, plus One” doesn’t demand to be understood, it asks to be inhabited. After all, entry is always a gesture of complicity.