Equilibria, marks the first solo exhibition by French artist Marie Lienhard at EXOgallery. At the heart of Lienhard’s practice lies her deep interest in human perception and balance, where invisible forces hold an object in a system suspended between movement and stillness, between active forces and their cancellation.

In physics, equilibrium describes a state in a stable balanced condition in which forces cancel one another. A body may remain at rest, or move constantly, because active forces within the system equalize one another. Equilibrium is therefore not the absence of force, but its perfect distribution. Beneath the visible surface forces are invisibly at work.

Lienhard’s works inhabit this fragile territory. Her meticulously designed installations, systems that were put in equilibrium by the artist herself, depend upon precise relations between weight, gravity, tension and suspension. What appears effortless or impossible in other terms is, in fact, the result of an exact and delicate choreography of forces set by the artist. The slightest disturbance can transform this perfect condition into collapse, suspension into fall.

Metaphorically being in balance, in a state of rest, might seem like a temporary release from the demands of the world. Her only representational work in the exhibition, a set of figurative drawings represent bodies at rest, suspended in an utopian bliss. Freed from the ground, they appear to exist outside the ordinary logic of effort. Rest becomes a state between being awake and dreaming, between gravity and weightedness.

The Artist brings us on a weightless journey through the earthly stratosphere, tracing 360-degree flights that dissolve the boundaries between body, space and gravity. Through the VR headset, the viewer is no longer a distant observer of the artist’s performance but a real time participant. The horizon turns, the earth recedes, and familiar notions of orientation begin to dissolve. For a moment, we can experience the space between earth and sky, grounded yet suspended, present yet adrift. It is an encounter with equilibrium as an embodied experience.

Equilibria is an exhibition about the moment in which opposing forces remain in a perfect match. As in every system, the balance can remain in place only if carefully taken care of. The exhibition challenges our own perception, and let us experience the invisible forces at work and… owe in stillness.