James Richards: Fevers

Sometimes, there is a fever to perception—a heat that builds when an image lingers too long, when a sound worms its way beneath language. Nothing is stable here, only fragments: half-memories, soft violence, quiet ecstasies. Images stutter, flare, recede. Looking does not lead to clarity but a kind of exposure. Fever, after all, is not an illness but a response—a regulated shift in the body’s set point, an internal decision to raise the heat. In fever, the body’s own systems intensify, working to defend and to heal, but also to open and purge—turning inward and outward at once.

Fever is the body’s rebellion, an insistence on its own agency. It signals not just intrusion or injury, but the body’s refusal to remain neutral—to stay cool and contained. In the heightened temperature of fever, the senses sharpen. Colors burn brighter, sounds penetrate deeper. Periphery becomes urgency, each sensation a small blaze. In the heat, we glimpse not just what threatens us, but what quickens us—what makes us feel most alive.

All this while we wait for it to break. The fever dream continues to hum, thick with the half-light of unsteady revelations. There is no stillness here, only a restless unfolding, the strange rupture of thresholds dissolving and reforming in endless succession. In a fevered state, the air seems to shiver, each breath a flicker of something not quite nameable. The fever does not so much end as recede, leaving in its wake a landscape of outlines—edges that glow, ripple, and refuse to fade. In the fever’s morning residue, the world leans closer, more alive in its fractures and flux.

Fevers is an exhibition by James Richards presenting recent and newly commissioned work in sound and image. It is curated by Tom Engels and will be accompanied by a publication by Grazer Kunstverein, designed by Julie Peeters, to be released later this year.