Empty Shop Katendrechtse Lagedijk 430
Judith Kakon, Laurent Dupont

In collaboration with the Brussel-based gallery Gauli Zitter, Rib presented works by Judith Kakon and Lauren Dupont. These works are seemingly simple yet complex at the same time. They are copies of copies, repurposed templates, and containers that, in their emptiness and form, are rich with meaning.

Iris (2024) by Judith Kakon take the form of industrially produced, standardized plastic containers typically used for transporting flowers. However, they were crafted from ceramic using a 3D printing process, with their colors and surfaces differing from the originals in that they were hand-glazed. The sculptures allude to the stackable flower containers by a major Dutch company in the flower trade. As such, they also evoke the commercial flower industry and speculative bubbles like the 17th-century “tulip mania” in the Netherlands. The sculptures speak to the reality of the flower industry as a commercial enterprise. Kakon’s falsely industrial trays for the transport of flowers, spotlit containers for things that’d be pretty were they not overly typical and gone anyway.

Nitrous Oxide(2024) by Laurent Dupont is a found cardboard box, repainted as a box using acrylic paint to replicate its original appearance. Since 2023, Dupont has more consistently pursued this practice, which began in 2020, of meticulously reproducing all visual elements of found cardboard boxes directly onto the actual boxes themselves. Most of these finds come from weekly trash collection for recycling.
This particular box exhibited in the context of Het Zuid Manifest originally contained a cartridge of nitrous oxide, a gas commonly used in the HORECA industry for whipped cream dispensers. In recent years, nitrous oxide has gained notoriety as “laughing gas,” widely consumed as an inexpensive drug. Today, it’s common to see streets in major cities littered with dozens of empty cartridges and similar boxes.