Agency, the brainchild organization of Belgian artist Kobe Matthys, constitutes an ongoing repository of objects, texts, images and other ephemera that he then amasses and catalogs into prodigious lists. These lists resist the opposition between creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and banality, individuals and collectives. Agency derives its listing process from lawsuits, cases, juridical processes, controversies, and issues surrounding intellectual property, where this bifurcation has been discussed. In Assembly (The Front Room), Agency “calls a thing forth, speculating on the question of composite works.” As the artist writes, “Thing 001408 (Lyon (Rhône), Place des Terreaux – Fontaine Bartholdi et Hôtel de Ville) convenes an assembly at The Front Room in order to bear witness.”

The photographs of Berlin-based artist Miriam Böhm often contain images-within-images, where shifting perspectives within a single frame fuse representation with pictorial illusion. Each study is meticulously crafted and photographed, cut and arranged, and re-photographed, resulting in a picture where still-life, landscape, background and foreground all exchange roles. Through a documentarian’s lens, she takes common motifs—landscape, architecture, or plants, in addition to “backdrop” materials like cardboard, marble, and fabric—and creates painterly tableaux that reveal the limitations of perception. In the Front Room, Böhm presents a recent suite of photographs, Unfinished (2009).

Agency was founded in 1992 by Kobe Matthys and has its address in Brussels.

Miriam Böhm was born in 1972 and she lives and works in Berlin. She has presented her work throughout Europe and the United States, including exhibitions at Ratio 3, San Francisco; White Cube, Berlin; and Harris Lieberman, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This is her first museum exhibition.