O KEINER: HANNAH BECQUANTE & FELIX TABURET

O KEINER presents O Niemand, O Du, a mosaic relief by Hannah Becquante & Félix Taburet, combining limestone, marble, mortar, pigments, steel and foam into a dense, layered composition.

The piece draws on Paul Celan’s poem Es war Erde in ihnen (There Was Earth in Them), where the relationship to the divine is never stable. God appears as absence, as “no one,” as a void that might still respond. From this starting point, the figures in the work emerge from the ground itself. It remains unclear whether they are being born or returning. None is fully buried, nor fully released from the earth. They can be read as bodies rising after collapse, or as organic formations: germs, seeds, movements within fertile matter.

All elements turn toward a metal shutter. It functions as a closed gate rather than an image. In its surface, a small opening reveals not a figure or symbol, but an intercom. It replaces the traditional pictorial presence of the divine: not a presence to behold, but the possibility of a voice, of a response, of contact after waiting.

The shutter behaves like a contemporary altarpiece: a mechanical system of concealment and revelation, echoing the opening and closing of religious panels. Yet nothing sacred is revealed. Instead, communication is displaced into everyday infrastructure. The work shifts the idea of religion toward its Latin root, religare “to bind” or “to connect” and presents it as a fragile, contemporary condition of relation without certainty of reply.

We wait for a voice, we hope for reassurance, for the possibility of something better beyond the threshold. Our prayers have become messages, our acts of faith the expectation of a reply. In an age of constant connectivity, O Niemand, O Du reflects on the paradox of our time: never have we been more connected, yet rarely have we felt more alone.

Installation views shot by Jerzy Goliszewski.