Banks Violette, Stephen O’Malley
TICK TACK presents Wish You Were Here, a new site-specific exhibition by renowned American artist Banks Violette, with an immersive sound work by Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O)))).
In Wish You Were Here, Banks Violette (Ithaca, 1973) presents a monumental sculptural installation specifically produced for TICK TACK’s brutalist exhibition space (Léon Stynen's The Sundial from 1955). Violette's work is both an intimate self-examination and radical social critique, a distinctive fusion of the frayed edges of American society with the aesthetic visual language of the hardcore punk underground scene. Throughout TICK TACK’s three exhibition floors, an immersive musical piece composed by Stephen O’Malley—founder of drone metal band Sunn O))) and a frequent collaborator with Violette—resonates.
Wish You Were Here explores the persistence of structures after meaning has dissolved. Absence is not a theme to be processed; it is the condition under which the exhibition operates. Forms, language and action continue even when their foundations have disappeared. Nothing is resolved, nothing reassured. Events repeat, signs circulate and perception is constantly haunted by what cannot be fully present.The work is anchored in the moment of Steven Parrino’s death on New Year’s Eve 2005. It refuses narrative closure, revealing how systems endure, communication fails, and presence is always shaded by what is missing. Ritual, performance and spectacle are stripped of certainty, exposed as fragile machinery.The gallery itself becomes part of this logic.
TICK TACK is organised across three interior levels, basement and two upper floors, creating spatial oppositions that reflect the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Violette treats these divisions as structural conditions. Movement between floors, contrasts of enclosed and open areas, and layered sightlines generate a sense of displacement. A communicating sculpture occupies the first two floors while the basement hosts a video installation. Above the basement, a smashed and burning disco ball references and subverts iconic celebrations while illuminated letters spelling THE END stretch from the first to the second floor, deliberately frustrating legibility and revealing their internal fixtures and wiring.A dense and immersive sound composition by Stephen O’Malley, titled Avaeken, resonates through all levels of the gallery. Its deep oscillations intensify the atmosphere, amplifying the tension between presence and absence, life and loss.
The music complements Violette’s structural interventions, creating a continuous interplay of sound, space and sculpture. The gallery becomes a site where continuity persists without reconciliation, and where architecture amplifies the contrast between what is present and what remains absent.Nihilism here is not an abstract position but a lived condition.
As Emil Cioran writes in Précis de décomposition:
“Nothingness is not an idea; it is a presence. It is not something we think; it is something we undergo. It accompanies us like a shadow that does not depend on light, like a familiarity older than any memory. It is not a matter of falling into nothingness, but of discovering that we have always lived within it.”
Absence does not negate experience; it structures it. What persists does so without justification, haunted by what can no longer appear.
Banks Violette, born 1973 in Ithaca, New York, is an American artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing and sound, informed by minimalism, conceptual art and subcultural forms drawn from heavy metal, punk and gothic aesthetics. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, BPS22 in Charleroi, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Bergen and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He has participated in significant group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zurich and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Violette’s work is held in major public collections including MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His long-standing collaborations with musicians, most notably Stephen O’Malley, extend his exploration of duration, intensity and absence across visual and sonic forms.
Stephen O’Malley is a composer, musician and visual artist whose practice spans experimental, drone and minimalist sound. He has conceptualised and participated in numerous projects over more than two decades, including SUNN O))), KTL and Khanate, and has collaborated with artists including Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, authors Dennis Cooper and Alan Moore, Peter Rehberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Jim Jarmusch and Johan Johansson. O’Malley has also worked with experimental music centres such as IRCAM, INA-GRM in Paris and EMS in Stockholm. A vigorous live performer, he has toured extensively since 2000, creating immersive environments where electric guitar minimalism transforms perception of space and time. Curated/text by Maria Abramenko