Maude Arès

In February, I attended Maude Arès’s live project La pomme par laquelle je bois at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau. I chose to sit on the outside of the table.

From that position, the structure’s point of entry was visible: where force enters, how the suspension system is set in motion, how movement travels from one point to another. As a curator, I have trained myself to look for this first — not what a work presents, but what it requires in order to hold together.

The artist stood outside the square structure and pushed a metal ring. The gesture was small, barely legible as a beginning. The suspension system began to turn slowly. The internal relations of the space started to redistribute.

The performance was almost entirely silent. The sound of metal against metal, water dropping, light shifting almost imperceptibly between registers of dark and bright. Suspended objects occasionally grazed the bodies of those present. Someone instinctively reached out to catch a drop of water before it hit the table. Fragments on the surface were nudged, displaced, drawn into new contact with one another. None of these actions were individually significant. Together, their persistence kept the space in a state of continuous internal movement — no moment stable, none decisive.

What I retained was not a specific image or event. It was a temporal structure: one that refused resolution without refusing to continue.

I asked Maude whether the work had ended when the visible movement stopped. She said she does not use ending as a unit of time. For her, the performance stopping is not the work stopping. The materials retain their own duration — they continue to change, to age, to act on one another. The work does not require a moment of termination to become complete.

That pointed toward a more fundamental structural question: what continues to operate after visible activity ceases? Which processes remain inaccessible while we are present, precisely because our presence interferes with their appearance?

This is not a question specific to this work. Many practices exist in a comparable condition: the work is finished, but the questions it opened are not. The exhibition closes, but the relations it established do not. An institutional cycle ends, but the conversations it made possible continue elsewhere. Judgments are issued and immediately begin to be revised. There is no moment that functions as a stable endpoint. This is where Time Commons began developing IN BETA.

IN BETA does not study incomplete works. It studies practices that continue to unfold — ways of working that refuse to be defined by a moment of completion. Maude Arès’s project became the first case not because it engages a particular subject, but because it made visible something I had not seen so clearly before: that the most consequential parts of some work do not happen at the beginning or the end. They happen in the duration — after the visible action has stopped, after we have left.

We entered it at one moment in its operation.

Time Commons
Ottawa, 2026