IMPERFECT RETURN

21.03.2025

If the circle is perfection, why does everything perfect tend to break?

If it is completion, why does every return seem to miss its own center?

Where does a circle begin? In the thought that imagines it, or in the hand that traces its form? Is it an origin or a return? A perfect shape, or the illusion of a balance that does not exist? The circle promises wholeness, a cycle that folds upon itself, the eternal motion of what always returns to its point of origin. But can we truly return? Or is eternal return merely a deception, a mirage concealing the irreducible fragmentation of time? Everything in the universe seems to follow a circular pattern. The stars move in elliptical orbits, waves crash and dissolve only to rise again, life is reborn in the endless becoming of nature. Time itself has been imagined by some as a spiral, a wheel that turns without pause, repeating the same dance infinitely. For Nietzsche, eternal return is the ultimate test of existence: if every moment is destined to repeat forever, can we embrace it unconditionally? Or does this awareness condemn us to an immutable fate, an invisible prison where every step has already been taken countless times? Can we ever truly return to the same point, or is the circle merely a cage, an illusory boundary drawn to impose meaning upon the meaningless?

Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought the circle and, with it, the promise of completion. It has been carved into stone, traced in the sky, danced in sacred rituals. It is the ouroboros, devouring its own tail in an eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth; the serpent bending onto itself to symbolize cyclical time, destiny consuming itself in repetition. It is the alchemist’s seal, the culmination of transmutation, the moment when everything dissolves only to be recomposed. But what happens if the circle does not close? If perfection fractures, if the line breaks and allows the void to seep through? A closed circle is security, repetition, harmony. But it is also a prison. The planets’ orbits are doomed to repeat, the cycle of life is an inevitable return, time coils upon itself and devours its own path. And yet, art, creation, and the intuition of thought have the power to interrupt this movement, to alter its trajectory, to slip into the space between beginning and end and reveal the unknown. Perhaps it is in that very interval, in that invisible fracture between completion and incompletion, that the true meaning of things is concealed.

IMPERFECT RETURN is an inquiry into the moment before closure, into what exists before the line becomes a boundary, before movement becomes confinement. It is the held breath before equilibrium, the vertigo of the not-yet, the tension of a universe that might fold back upon itself or disperse into nothingness. It is the possibility that precedes form, the promise of a return that will never arrive, the void from which everything is born and to which everything might return. But if eternal return is an inevitable cycle, can we break it? Can we shift its trajectory, or are we merely cogs in a mechanism doomed to repeat endlessly? This exhibition invites artists to explore the circle not as a given form, but as an open question, a boundary that can be crossed, distorted, left unfinished. Is it the emptiness at the center that matters, or the line that encloses it? Does truth lie in the perfect circle, or in its rupture? Each artist is called to ask: is the circle fate or choice? Can we inhabit it without becoming prisoners of it? Or perhaps true freedom lies in leaving it open, in never closing it, in accepting that eternal return is an illusion, and that art, like life, exists only in the moment when perfection shatters. Perhaps the only truth is not in the circle that closes, but in the deviation, the anomaly, the fracture. Perhaps eternal return is not a condemnation, but a possibility. The choice is ours - to follow it or to break it.

Concept by Lisa Galletti Senior Art Curator