The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the 1993 song ‘Missing’ by Everything But the Girl, points to the feeling of heartbreak and yearning projected onto distant, anthropomorphized ecologies. Just as the desert in this case is supposed to miss the rain that is unknown to it, the human and nonhuman protagonists found throughout the different works in the exhibition are encountered in liminal spaces, straddling incommensurate states of being. The sense of loss is for something unknown and intangible, just beyond articulation, and yet the processes of production continue to expand and grow undisturbed.

In Wagner’s practice, there often exists a lacuna; a gap is opened up between the work-in-itself and work-as-idea, that addresses and activates the viewer with an imperative to build, creating a circuitous relationship in which the boundaries between external and internal, between form, content and corporality are dissolved.

‘Like the deserts miss the rain’, curated by Judith Vrancken, brings together several recent works by Beny Wagner (print, video) as well as newly commissioned work within an installation environment designed for the space.

Made possible with the generous support of the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35935