Room Tone: Sarah Caillard
STANCE is pleased to announce Room Tone, the first Swedish solo exhibition by Brussels-based artist Sarah Caillard. In her multidisciplinary practice, Caillard examines the delicate threshold between presence and absence, rendering what is usually unseen or unspoken into material form.
Haunting denotes a state of non-being, an encounter with broken time. In the introduction
to Ghostly Matters, sociologist Avery Gordon writes that “haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment [...] when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away […].” Sarah Caillard’s multidisciplinary practice gives fragile form to these states of phantasmic rupture, layering sensual associations to dreams, memory, metamorphosis, and the porous boundary between presence and disappearance. In her paintings and sculptures, she stages recurring motifs like fabrics, butterflies, mythological creatures, and shifting depictions of the feminine form to make perceptible what ordinarily slips from view.
The exhibition takes its title from the filmmaking term describing ambient silence—the recorded background noise of a space without dialogue. For Caillard, Room Tone evokes the soft, liminal moments of falling asleep, where imagination drifts and silence becomes a form of sound. Drawing on her background in film and theater, the works unfold as a dramaturgy of absence, where forms and figures hover between materiality and ghostliness. Caillard’s concrete sculptures counterbalance the solidity and roughness of their material with the ephemerality of fleeting gesture. Reflective surfaces scatter light, revealing and concealing at intervals, while repeated or disjointed gestures culled from art history and popular culture coalesce into an archaeology of postures and forms. Codes of femininity are liberated from convention, manifesting as spectral and transformative states rather than as a static condition. Alongside the sculptures, four silk paintings extend Caillard’s exploration of intimacy, imagination, and epigenetic transmission. Butterfly in the Stomach evokes the unsettling yet transformative sensation of change, fusing biological and emotional states, while the Bed Fold series situates the body within abstracted bedsheets, where sleeping figures and folds merge into landscapes of fiction and reality. Across materials and media, Caillard conjures a silent, uncanny space where the psyche, memory, and imagination intersect, and absence resonates as presence.
Text: Jesi Khadivi
Sarah Caillard (b. 1988) has presented numerous solo exhibitions across Europe and the United States, including Butterfly in the Stomach at Galerie Ruttkowski;68 in Cologne (2025), Layers with Kevin Pinsembert at Île Mardi in Brussels (2024), Casting at 10N in Brussels (2023), and Fuite Romanesque at Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris (2022). Earlier solo presentations include Wayfarer with Douglas Eynon at The Cabin, Los Angeles (2019), Boo Who in Brussels (2018), La Nuit Américaine in Paris and The Apple of My Eyes in Molenbeek (2017), Napoli in Ghent (2016), and Novembre in Brussels (2015). She has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris (2022–2023), La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles (2018–2019), Le Grand Phare, Belle-Île-en-Mer (2018), RAVI, Liège (2017), and Fondation Moonens, Brussels (2014–2015), where she was also awarded the Fondation Moonens grant in 2014.
