Time, in “STEADYSTATE,” doesn’t tick — it lingers, loops, and evaporates. The group exhibition at Zero… in Milan, co-curated with Frankfurt-based gallery Neue Alte Brücke and Matt Williams, draws its conceptual scaffolding from the steady-state theory of the expanding universe — a bold alternative to the big bang proposed in the 1940s and ’50s — envisioning a cosmos without beginning or end, in constant expansion yet always in equilibrium. Against dominant narratives of singularity and rupture, “STEADYSTADE” suggests a world where creation is continuous, where matter appears to fill a void, and where change happens as quiet persistence.
Featuring seventeen international artists, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on time not as a neutral container, but as an active condition: one that structures perception, experience, and being itself. In this sense, “STEADYSTATE” resonates closely with the notion of temporality elaborated by Martin Heidegger in The Concept of Time (1992) and Being and Time (1927): time is not something we move through, but the fundamental horizon of our existence. The steady state theory, like Heidegger’s radical temporality, can feel disorienting. It flattens any narrative. It dissolves origin. Given how fixated on beginnings and endings we are, this is deeply unsettling — but also, in a way, liberating. “STEADYSTADE” doesn’t soothe that anxiety; it holds it in suspension.
This logic of suspension is perhaps most vividly embodied in Cally Spooner’s durational performance score active because it leaks (2022). There is no fixed moment of presentation, only intervals of activation in which the gallery subtly yields to the rhythms of rehearsal, fatigue, and bodily care. The performers haunt the space, effecting micro-ruptures to its infrastructure. Spooner’s work dissolves any easy distinction between production and maintenance, time and event. It plays out as a temporal drag — a slow leak of meaning and attention.
Nearby, Mariia Andreeva’s Scanner (2023) performs a more technological surveillance, yet one equally interested in unstable positions of looking. A mechanical eye that rotates steadily across the room implicates both viewer and space in an endless feedback loop: Who is watching whom, and through what apparatus? Its cold precision complements Spooner’s organic cadence, with both works circling the idea that time isn’t something we observe from the outside; we’re embedded in it.
That tension – between embodiment and control, presence and erasure – pulses throughout the show. Eva Gold’s contributions push it inward. Upstairs, the vintage couch of You were disgusting and that’s why I followed you (2024) becomes a rhetorical stage for a spoken poem, evoking domestic memory and intergenerational residue: “Right at the very beginning when you caught my eye, I had the uncanny sense that I was making eye contact with my own reflection.” Downstairs, 24 Hours (Residual Heat) (2025) silently manipulates perception. The LED strip, installed just above eye level, mirrors the light cycle of a full day, inducing a subtle recalibration of the body’s internal clock. Gold’s work doesn’t show time but rather, infiltrates it, turning the gallery into a circadian system.
Nat Faulkner approaches time through slow chemical transformation. His plexiglass window [Untitled (Iodine), 2025] filled with liquid Iodine seeps into the architecture, literally staining the floor. A second work, Untitled (Stephenson Street) (2025) carries the bodily metaphor further, suggesting skin, fluid, and dissolution. It speaks to time not as duration but as corrosion — an uncontainable seepage through material, memory, and space.
In this entropic register, Horst Ademeit’s obsessive archive feels less like an outsider’s paranoia and more like a parallel cosmology. 3497 (02.10.1998) (1998) is one of his daily Polaroids, annotated with elaborate data meant to track and prove the existence of invisible “cold rays.” These artifacts enact their own steady state: a compulsive ritual of documentation that resists both end and purpose. Like the steady-state universe, Ademeit’s project never culminates; it simply continues, dense with meaning and blind spots.
Ghislaine Leung cuts through this continuity with a conceptual scalpel. Her work Surgery (2024) appears on both floors of the gallery, in which a portion of the architecture – precisely 1% – is removed and wrapped in industrial plastic. This gesture, echoing both institutional critique and personal biography (her hysterectomy), is subtle yet radical. Leung subtracts instead of adding, exposing the body of the institution itself and the systems through which we perceive space and time.
Finally, on the furthest wall of the ground floor is a sudden gesture toward transcendence. Yvo Cho’s drone video The Dome (2024) sweeps through Cologne Cathedral. Filmed without permission, the work floats through sacred space with uncanny grace. The movement is reverent, precise, and otherworldly – an act of devotion. It’s as if the drone becomes a spirit, tracking the architecture of belief, disembodied and ecstatic. The soundtrack deepens this sense of immersion that we are no longer on ground.
“STEADYSTATE” is not interested in conclusions. It proposes an art of persistence, delay, and slippage: a cosmology where everything is always already becoming something else. Like Heidegger’s time, it doesn’t point forward or back, but radiates outward, drawing us into overlapping frequencies where meaning never settles – only recurs.
