Black Hole Horizons

Black Hole Horizons draws on traditions of divination in which objects are set into motion to yield answers about uncertain futures. In this work, a dark, varnished wooden sculpture—formed like a black hole—enters the exhibition space by being physically rolled across the floor. Its passage leaves behind a thin trail of mechanical oil, a residue that records its movement as both mark and omen.

The title invokes the phenomenon of “liquidity black holes,” moments when financial markets seize and liquidity evaporates, precipitating systemic crises. By pairing this economic metaphor with the sculpture’s slow, deliberate motion, the work frames divination, prediction, and collapse as intertwined forces shaping how we navigate what lies ahead.

ARTEFACT 2017, The Act of Magic, Leuven, BE (14 x 8,4 x 3 m.) Photo: Kristof Vrancken

The sculpture is part of the installation Cultivating Probability, which is based on research into how people in different times and cultures try to predict and influence decision-making processes and the future paths of specific situations. The sculptural objects part of Cultivating Probability speculate and unite attitudes and rituals from different cultures and periods into a fictional anthropological display. The installation consists of a collection of diverse objects spread throughout the exhibition space, where some are susceptible to change and movement.

“Marjolijn Dijkman’s sculptures are imagined miniatures of divination, the figures and gestures of the desire to read the future. ‘Magic’ can mean different things: on the one hand, there are the strategies of markets where to foretell – combining algorithms and astrology – means to manage and transmit information for profit. Here magic means the miraculous trick and deceptively incomprehensible act that is meant to calculate the future. In this context, Cultivating Probability frames this transcultural desire to control and stages a few figures of uncertainty, indeterminacy and ambiguity. The probable is the unpredictable side of life and the latter stays human as long as its possibilities are not completely determinable. Maybe the installation shows that the indeterminate is human, essential to both enchanting art and the artistic magic. ”  – from: ‘Decommissioned Truths Marjolijn Dijkman’s Cultivating Probability’ by Vlad Ionescu, 2017