Haunted is a group exhibition that presents a constellation of artistic practices flickering through aesthetic and temporal experience. Staged in a former commercial space in the heart of Mulhouse, resonating with the city’s layered history, the project maps a cartography of looping narrative, disrupting the now by inserting ghostly traces of the past, present, and unrealized futures.
Resisting linear time and binary thinking, Haunted navigates a terrain suspended between presence and absence, where noise, fractured identities, repetition, afterimages, and deferred visions converge.
Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, where the ghost becomes a figure of deferred arrival and spectral return, the exhibition enacts a poetics of decay, interruption, and latent memory. As Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life, we live among lost futures, suspended in a cultural moment haunted by what could have been. We are, he adds, “haunted by futures that failed to materialize,” caught in a loop where the past continues to interrupt the present.
In this spirit, Haunted explores how the past seeps into the now, not in linear chronology but through atmospheric residues, looping time, and affective traces.
Set in a commercial unit in Mulhouse, a city whose layered pasts linger in both its material and psychic landscapes, the exhibition unfolds like a quiet invocation. The space itself becomes an active agent in this choreography of presence and absence. Here, the works do not demand attention, they haunt it. Sculptural fragments, found detritus, digital relics, errant texts, and suspended forms operate as aesthetic apparitions.
Haunted does not offer consolation. Instead, it opens a space for listening to the quiet murmur of what remains. Rather than exorcising ghosts, the exhibition makes room for them, acknowledging the ways in which history persists in material, memory, and site. It is an aesthetics of the unfinished, of still-becoming, that permeates the contemporary condition.
What if the ruin is not an end, but a threshold?
What if to be haunted is to remain open, to alternate temporalities, to unseen influences, to the futures we have yet to remember?