In collaboration with artist Moritz Haase, Distinct Inside staged a para-curatorial and poetic intervention titled Theses on the Radiator, presented at KW Institute for Contemporary Art as part of the UdK × KW project Napping in Density. Haase’s thermographic images — heat-sensitive photographs printed on thermochromic paper — were mounted directly onto a functioning radiator. The images shift subtly when touched, breathing and transforming through proximity, evoking a gestational temporality of slow transformation and held duration.

Approaching Haase’s thermal photography through the curatorial methods of Distinct Inside, the work elaborated the concept of radiating meaning rather than signifying — first articulated with Michael Hazell in the exhibition Lieblingsfarbe (Kunstraum Reuter, 2024) — and extended the strategy of the hacked didactic panel — developed together for the group show BOO (P145, 2019). Both concepts draw from Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics, rejecting didacticism in art and the reflexive predicament, favouring instead an affective, latency-driven logic of staging.

A short text-work, also titled Theses on the Radiator, functioned as an inaesthetic treatise resisting explanation in favour of sensation. This poetic-philosophical gesture extended the para-curatorial dimension into the exhibition’s printed catalogue, where the curatorial voice entered indirectly, smuggled through language rather than display. The piece proposed a gestural, porous, infra-curatorial mode of presence — one that circulates without insisting.

Exhibition: Napping in Density: Re-vision und Re-aktion
Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Dates: 24–25 February 2024
Presented by: Universität der Künste Berlin × KW
Thermal Photography: Moritz Haase
Concept, Text, Para-Curatorial Staging: Pawel Jankiewicz (Distinct Inside)
Conceptual Lineage: Michael Hazell (BOO, P145, 2019; Lieblingsfarbe, Kunstraum Reuter, 2024)

[photographs and mockups: Moritz Haase]