Rashid Johnson’s search for meaning in the Mediterranean

In 1929, not long after he arrived in the Balearic Islands, Robert Graves wrote the poem In No Direction, which considers the paradox of wandering aimlessly: ‘To go in no direction/ Surely as carelessly,/ Walking on the hills alone,/ I never found easy’.

As a survivor of the First World War’s lost generation, Graves found it almost impossible to accept a senseless universe. Even a stick thrown in the air might fall in such a way as to be ‘prophetic’. That need to find meaning is worth keeping in mind when visiting Directionless, a group exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca.

The gallery’s outpost sits on the tiny Illa del Rei, a short boat ride from the town of Mahón on the Menorca mainland. Until 1964, the island was home to a quarantine hospital for the military. The building is still there, with its Christopher Wren-like façade, a legacy of the British naval fleet that dominated the Mediterranean in the 18th century.

The art centre is housed in the hospital’s outbuildings, which the architect Luis Laplace has transformed into eight long, linear galleries, with high wood-beam ceilings and windows that look out over a tiny, sunlit cove. There is a shop, a restaurant and an education lab, in keeping with the gallery’s community-focused ethos. In the gardens, designed by Piet Oudolf, the scent of wild chamomile and fig is heavy on the breeze, and olive trees shade diners at the restaurant, Cantina, from the intensity of the Balearic light.

It is easy on this Elysian promontory to lose one’s bearings and drift in a state of ecstatic limbo, and forgivable to think that Directionless, organised by Rashid Johnson, has little or no narrative thread. However, such fluidity is half the point. Featuring 28 artists selected by Johnson, Charles Gaines, Firelei Báez and Cristina Iglesias, the exhibition considers what Johnson describes as ‘these politically disorientating times, which are marked by profound exhaustion’. Climate change, the pandemic, war and AI all suggest different versions of the future, creating extreme anxiety and helplessness.

Wandering through the space is a little like being lost at sea. The whitewashed galleries, gently air-conditioned and interrupted by glimpses of the ocean, encourage a disconnection with the fierce heat outside, where the sun, slanted, yellow and insistent, makes everything feel a little lightheaded.

It is not as if things don’t happen: Yto Barrada’s 2015 film Faux départ (False start) considers the paradox of creativity in her native Morocco, where craftsmen have turned their artisanal skills to faking fossils for the tourist market. It is a funny, bleak indictment of consumerism, just as Hugh Hayden’s sculpture of a suit jacket sprouting branches suggests a contemporary reading of Cyparissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, transplanted to the world of finance.

But, like the Mediterranean itself, the exhibition is labile — a vast negative space that resists simple navigation. After a while, it is hard not to identify with Sigalit Landau’s lone figure ceaselessly walking around a rotating platform in the middle of the ocean in There for Good (2023).

It would be easy in the circumstances to miss the undertow that slowly reveals itself. Firelei Báez suggests using Ursula K. Le Guin as a guide. The science-fiction writer and student of Taoism once observed that a directionless life is the result of society's obsession with speed and progress. Le Guin always said that her writing was not about the future but the present, and her overriding idea about people was that the more they were in control, the worse the mistakes they were likely to make.

And so what first appears to be an exhibition about a loss of direction is in fact about the human desire to impose order on a world that may have none. It is something Johnson makes reference to in his semi-abstract paintings. The repeated motif of a house in the 2026 work Home Painting ‘Dwellings’ initially appears to suggest a sequence of some kind, but in actuality is just an arbitrary pattern.

That tension is used most decisively by Charles Gaines in his seminal series Night/Crimes, in which reportage photographs of violent murders are paired with images of the night sky taken on the date the crimes occurred. The graininess of the photographs is echoed in the constellations: both are nothing more than black marks on a white surface. There is no inherent relationship other than the coordinates of longitude and latitude printed beneath each picture.

Night/Crimes implies there is no cosmic significance in indiscriminate violence. There is no fate in the stars and no prophetic way for a stick to fall, it is all just time. Those who have demanded we ‘take back control’ might find something to reflect on here.

Directionless is at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 25 October 2026

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