Point of origin of Mandla Reuter’s work in recent years often was a plot of land on a paper street near Downtown, Los Angeles. Purchased for the exhibition, ‘A Plot’, at De Vleeshal in Middelburg in 2010, Reuter has regularly drawn from this empty lot as a fount of source material. Since then the site served him as a virtual studio, of theoretical endless dimension unlimited by geography, while sitting vacant in East Los Angeles. Departing from this approach Reuter’s work is regularly set in the in-between, escaping fixed categorizations.

The exhibition Neompalta deals with these in-between conditions of materials and situations, in-between times and timezones, set in the future, in the past, or in the in-between spaces, which occur, when time passes and objects move through. Departing from his work Atlantis, 2016 in the collection of the Friends of S.M.A.K., Reuter has developed Neompalta, an exhibition consisting of a constellation of newly produced as well as earlier works, creating a web of references, which weave their way through the exhibition and establish an abstract narration.

NEOMPALTA in the space of Friends of SMAK is Mandla Reuter’s first solo exhibition in Belgium. Mandla Reuter was born in 1975 in Nqutu, South Africa. He works and lives in Berlin.