Instructions

Group Exhibition

Rexhibit Online Gallery is proud to present the international online group exhibition Instructions — “Following What Was Never Said.”

‍An instruction is often understood as an explicit command, a written rule, or a direction to be followed. Yet many of the instructions that shape our lives are never directly communicated. They exist within social expectations, inherited behaviors, cultural conventions, and everyday routines. Often absorbed without conscious recognition, these invisible directions influence how we think, act, relate to others, and understand the world around us.

‍Instructions considers the ways individuals encounter and respond to visible and invisible systems of guidance, expectation, and authority. Instructions do not always originate from a clearly identifiable source, nor do they necessarily demand obedience. They may emerge through habit, memory, language, social relationships, or personal experience, operating somewhere between conscious decisions and learned responses. What appears to be an individual choice may reflect an inherited pattern, while following an instruction can also become an act of interpretation, negotiation, or transformation.

Across different artistic practices, the selected artists approach instructions as something constructed, inherited, internalized, questioned, or reinterpreted. These processes may unfold through the body, everyday objects, technology, language, labor, ritual, and repetition. Rather than treating instructions solely as fixed commands, the exhibition explores the shifting relationships between obedience and resistance, guidance and autonomy, repetition and change. Together, the works reveal how instructions can both establish structures and create possibilities for unexpected interpretations.

‍Instructions invites us to reconsider the forces that guide our actions, including those we may have never consciously recognized. It asks a central question: Who gives an instruction when no one is speaking? Through these works, the exhibition encourages us to look beyond what is explicitly stated and examine how meaning and behavior emerge through expectation, interpretation, habit, and individual agency. An instruction becomes not merely something to follow, but something that can be questioned, misunderstood, negotiated, and ultimately rewritten.