An object that has a length has one dimension. A length and width make two, and an object with a length, a width, and a height has three dimensions. Any object that really exists, from the time it came into existence until the moment it vanishes forever, also has duration, which is the fourth dimension. Before the fourth dimension was understood as time, it was briefly described as a transcendental dimension of space and imagined as the domain of what existed beyond height. 

Euclid and Brexit make for strange bedfellows; the father of classical geometry with the colloquial term for the United Kingdom’s planned withdrawal from the European Union–but Euclid in Europe imbricates geometrical and political space to ask what kind of political dimension are we about to enter. 

The possibility of higher-dimensional spaces (beyond three) in classical geometry is often traced to a twenty-four year old Immanuel Kant, who asked, If all space were empty but for a single human hand, would it make sense to ask whether that hand was specifically a right hand? in ‘The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics’ (1783). ‘Euclid in Europe’ maps these higher dimensions to geo- and bio-politics. To visualise the problem Kant posed, imagine the outline of a hand printed onto a transparent surface. It can appear to be either a left or a right hand, depending on the position of the observer. Left or right only make sense within the boundaries of two-dimensional space; once you move into the third dimension, left and right become observer-dependent, rather than independent, characteristics. Their outline is neither left nor right, but sometimes left and sometimes right. 

Angela Bulloch’s sculptures of rhomboidal prisms are also observer-dependent: they might seem irregular from a certain viewpoint, regular from an opposing perspective. As the viewer paces her way around the gallery, Bulloch’s Paravents seem to rotate around their axis. A Wall Painting –‘Untitled Wall Painting Can do Blue’ (2017)– looks sectioned upon frontal inspection, yet unitary from an oblique view point. Voters, like viewers, see different things from different angles. But what appears as a geometrical property of the objects on display might be the effect of a political force—attraction and repulsion between Britain and the EU— and the spatial distortions this force engenders: borders once erased will be erected, geographies will be sectioned and torn apart, identities will be warped and balkanised. The invoking of Article 50 will redefine social and cultural space. Standing at the threshold of this pivotal moment, Bulloch’s rhomboidal formations embody these opposing forces, personifying  political vectors as warped geometries and social uncertainty as edgy, unsteady looking stacks. 

If space is the site of the coexistence of bodies, just as time is the order of the succession of events, Bulloch leads us to wonder what kind of place will these geometrically ambiguous objects define. 

Ana Teixeira Pinto, May 2017