"What Do You Think I Think" by Kenny Dunkan & Yoko Ono

“What do you think I think?”—the question lingers, unanchored. A turn of phrase often heard in therapy, somewhere between provocation and reflection, it opens up a loop of projections. This exhibition unfolds as a quiet yet charged encounter between two artists, two “others,” whose works never fully disclose themselves yet invite a proximity that is at once tender and disconcerting. Across the gallery space, three works by Kenny Dunkan converse visually, materially, and sensorially with a video piece by Yoko Ono, Painting to Shake Hands (2012).

Originally conceived as one of the “event scores” in her 1964 conceptual book Grapefruit, Ono’s piece suggests:

“Drill a hole in a canvas and put your hand out from behind. Receive your guests in that position. Shake hands and converse with hands.”

In the video, a hand - her own, lace covered, emerges from a pierced canvas, an invitation to meet, to connect, even if awkwardly. We do not see the face, the body, or the speaker. Only the hand: an orifice, a gesture, a threshold. The painting becomes a prosthesis for social relation, a site where ritual, vulnerability, and irony coexist.

Ono’s piece anchors the exhibition as both a hinge and a prompt, a script for contact. On either side of it, Dunkan’s sculptures stage presences that seem to withdraw as they appear, each layered with codes, residues, and charms. Where Ono drills the canvas, Dunkan drills into form itself, remaking the sculptural in vernaculars both intimate and insurgent.

Positioned awkwardly: both frontal and recessed, Parasitic Thoughts by Dunkan displayed beneath a glass plate embedded in the floor. Neither fully visible nor fully inaccessible, it evokes the presence of something dormant, or waiting. The preserved insects trapped in resin, suspended in time-conjure vernacular French expressions like avoir le cafard (“to feel low”) or avoir des araignées au plafond (“to have spiders in the attic”), idioms of mental unease. Yet the piece is also meticulously constructed: a weapon turned relic, a melancholy turned ritual. It does not ask for touch, only for contemplation.

In the Caribbean, the calabash, here halved and suspended, is a humble object, often repurposed by enslaved communities as a bowl or plate. In Dunkan’s BLIGIDING!, it becomes the anchor of a personal cosmology: a charm, a container, a talisman. Around it, Dunkan assembles a constellation of collected debris: currency, insects, Euro-trash, beads, broken nets, held together by a metal grid from an anti-vandalism basketball hoop. The result is a precarious balance between the sacred and the disposable. It is intimate, even autobiographical, yet insists on opacity. We are not invited to decipher it, only to dwell in its orbit. The work hums with accumulated references and private mappings: a form of possible autobiography, flickering between fetish and fiction.

In his Untitled, a modular bi-dimensional sculpture, Dunkan returns to a recurring motif: the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of both aspiration and alienation. Cast in shimmering gradients and reassembled into ornamental rosettes, these forms appear decorative but resist domestication. They recall colonial trophies, ceremonial medals, or ironic chandeliers…

Each of Dunkan’s works complicates the relationship between body and monument. They refuse the rigidity of the statue, and instead propose an alternative vocabulary made of fragility, bricolage, transformation. These are not monuments to power, but to the “inner state of”, to exhaustion, memory, persistence. They echo the gesture in Ono’s video: to offer one’s hand, even when it is hidden behind a surface; to reach out, even while cloaked in ritual or ambiguity.

And perhaps this is the thread tying the works together: each piece stages a relation between the visible and the unseen, between form and its haunting, between the self and another. They are not declarations, but positions; not identities, but gestures.
“What do you think I think?”

The question rebounds not as an answer, but as an echo - circulating through calabashes, crystals, insects, and lace. It suggests that understanding may not lie in translation, but in resonance. That a hand offered through a canvas, like a charm suspended in air, is less an image to be decoded than a threshold to be crossed.

Curated by Azad Asifovich & Hannah Kreile

Échos à Paris Noir program, curated by Alicia Knock at the Centre Pompidou.