After seeing Ryan Gander’s exhibition One Hundred Things Twice, Hana Elhaddad wrote an open letter to the artist outlining her concerns
Dear Mr Gander,
When I arrived at the Salzburger Kunstverein at 20:29 on Friday 14 August, I thought your exhibition space facing the Kunstverein’s entrance was a boarded-up construction site. Behind its glass doors was what appeared to be a wooden wall and two green baskets; I did not realise that it was your exhibition One Hundred Things Twice until Sunday 16 August, when the service-desk manager gently pushed me through the wooden swing door and into the development.
I have since visited your ‘exhibition’ multiple times and am constantly reminded of the Geneva Freeport. Thing #45: Once seen entering never seen again (2026) is ‘a building site hoarding covering one side of the gallery in which a standard-sized swing door is left partially open to enter and exit the gallery space’.
Who do you expect to enter through the partially open door, Mr Gander? A viewer’s presence seems to me obsolete on a building site – unless they are on the building team. ‘The entirety of the hoardings have been fly-posted with a random selection of 51 posters for fictional exhibitions at existing institutions with existing artists and artworks, that never occurred, but that in the mind of the artist, could have.’ One Hundred Things Twice is an exhibition installed at an institution in which viewing is the principal act: the human viewer, in a way, verifies the exhibition.
After being nudged into the gallery space hosting One Hundred Things Twice, I meekly walked myself back outside the wooden door. By my feet were the two green boxes holding what turned out to be auction paddles (Things #35–36: I’M SO TIRED THE SHEEP ARE COUNTING ME, 2026) with a sign above them saying, ‘Please insure you take a paddle when you enter the exhibition’.
I randomly picked up auction paddle #237. I glanced to my left at your plastic console, Thing #29: Homeless, religious and high (2026), then pressed the blue circle, then the red square, then the yellow triangle. Nothing happened. I am not sure what I wanted to happen. But pushing the buttons felt illicit.
To my right was a stack of the publication that accompanies the exhibition – I grabbed one and walked back through the swing door. It took me about an hour of zigzagging across the room to locate your 100 ‘things’. Or almost 100. There were some that I could not find, however, and I did not know whether it was appropriate to ask the service-desk manager, who at that point had walked into the space with Thing #95: Poum-poum, tic-tac, plouf (2022) and Thing #96: Plouf, tic-tac, poum-poum (2026), or try again.
In most institutions where the human function is voyeuristic, the objects on display cater to the sense of sight. This is not how I experienced your things in One Hundred Things Twice, Mr. Gander. There is a self-consciousness about them – as if they just happen to appear and are gaily presenting themselves to a visitor. They seem highly unstable, which is not how I usually experience art objects presenting themselves. Usually, art objects carry a sureness of presence informed by their display. I assume most of the Kunstverein’s visitors did not expect this from your things either: on every visit I have made to the space there has always been a person not carrying your publication who enters, walks in a circle and leaves. I can almost hear their inner dialogue: ‘What is this? Is this the artwork?’
I did not, though. Once I located your 100 things, I went down the Kunstverein’s main staircase, took a copy of the July–August issue of kunst:art from a pile to my left beside the front door and climbed up to my studio, where I ripped your publication apart. I tried to limit it to the pages that I had annotated with ‘??’or ‘!!’ or ‘I can’t find this’.
Then I cut up the flyer for Kateryna Lysovenko’s intervention in the Kunstverein’s Ringgalerie. Her murals address who gets to be approved as human. Who gets ‘dehumanised’ due to unfamiliarity. What is me but not me, and what do I make of this it.
What makes a thing human, Mr Gander?
Having exhausted Lysovenko’s, I cut up your flyer (the A5 one that visitors are invited to take with them) and glued sections to what was now becoming a collage. I had written preliminary notes on it during my visit.
‘I pick a number.’
‘I press the buttons – nothing happens.’
‘I try to find my paddle number in the book – it doesn’t exist’ … duh, because there are only 100 things and I picked auction paddle #237.
By Thing #7 in your publication, I wrote: ‘There are twos of everything, but there also aren’t.’
‘I feel confused.’
I also stapled your publication’s entry on Thing #45 to the collage
I am writing this letter in the exhibition space on Sunday 23 August, and my body feels stuck in a suspension. Prior to my entering, I picked up a third copy of the Kunstverein’s palm-size calendar booklet that has custom CAPTCHAs for each month. You created a CAPTCHA for August that says, ‘Select All Squares with Meaning’. But the squares you created do not carry inherent meaning (seven colourful balls and two colourful umbrellas) unless my senses decide they do. If I see that it is a rainy day, could I select the squares that carry umbrellas?
Olive, one of the mice in Things #63–64: The story is in the telling (2025), says that reality depends on the suspension of disbelief. Are you implying, Mr Gander, that reality for the human entity necessitates an acknowledgement of the meaninglessness of what the senses perceive? Could machines trained on CAPTCHAs pass your test?
Your publication helps partially remedy this existential crisis. Each thing makes some sense within itself after I read its respective entry. But when I simply look at one of your things my body is once again suspended. This suspension does not feel rational: in fact, my thinking brain switches off each time I enter the exhibition space. It feels like being stuck in a thought bubble, à la Thing #13: Cutting along a dotted line towards a scissors logo (2011), which dangles from the ceiling.
Your 100 things carry an instability. But also, they do not. Without your publication I would likely have not been able to view each thing, despite seeing them.
Perhaps it is about being able to sit within the instability.
To date, I have accumulated four copies of Kunst:art, one of which I have used as a makeshift tablecloth for an apéro; another covers the dining table on which I work.
Mr Gander, what exactly are we doing? What am I looking at, exactly?
Yours,
Hana
Hana Elhaddad is a researcher based in Cairo