Dane Mitchell's second exhibition at RaebervonStenglin, All Whatness is Wetness, springs a phenomenological encounter on its viewers. Art is to be experienced not as a discrete object but as an unpredictable wetness: a room in which vapour is both present and ever-vanishing. This vaporous sculptural form is always in flux, yet presents an eternal phenomenon, as old as the earliest beginnings of life.

Labelled bottles explain the provenance of the water: the Maeander River – now known as the Büyük Menderes, and from which the word "meander" derives – winds its way through Asia Minor before reaching the Aegean Sea at what was once the ancient Greek city of Miletus. There, the Milesian school philosopher Thales (c. 624–546 BC) hypothesised that the nature of all matter derives from a single primordial substance: water. This notion that "all whatness is wetness" represents the beginnings of scientific philosophy, for the first time rejecting mythological explanations of natural phenomena in favour of a rational investigation into matter.

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The Maeander has always been in motion – carving, looping, doubling back on itself across millennia. That it should, several millennia later, take a detour to a gallery in Zürich is the result of a quest undertaken by the artist, who has himself meandered from as far as New Zealand. Mitchell bottled water from the river, flew it to Switzerland, and applied the homeopathic method to it – a method that relies on the principle that water can hold memory, and that through a specific process of dilution and succussion any remnant of the original river exists purely through memory rather than molecule. This gesture of bottling and transporting does not interrupt the river's movement so much as extend it, recruiting the Maeander into an itinerary it could not have anticipated. According to homeopathic principles, dilution strengthens rather than weakens potency – and there is a quiet analogy here with the experience of art itself: both operate on the premise that something need not be materially present to exert its force. The memory of the Maeander, retained in water so diluted it contains no trace of the original, is not unlike the afterimage of an artwork, present in the body long after the encounter has ended.

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By way of an ultrasonic humidifier located beneath the gallery floor, this water is exhaled as vapour from a drain running along the back of the gallery, to be experienced according to the viewer's vantage point and associations: as a shifting form to be peered down on, walked through, inhaled or glimpsed from afar; as suggestive of geothermal activity; as a spectral apparition; or as something steamly evocative of cinematic imagery. As vapour, the water of the Maeander becomes something shared and unavoidably intimate – inhaled by every visitor, incorporated briefly into each body before being exhaled back into the room. The gallery space becomes a kind of commons, the ancient river held in common lung.

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Accompanying this protean wetness are brass sculptures that embody the concepts of the previous room in the form of simple Venn diagrams; while in the back space, undiluted water from the Maeander River rests within a piece of scientific glass tubing, its curved form suggestive of a meandering line.

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Science, homeopathy, history, natural phenomena, allegory and symbolism all collide in Mitchell's installation, which plays on the viewer's mind as much as it invades the body through physical spectacle. For over a decade the artist has explored phenomena at the edges of perception, previously working with dust, scent, bacteria and occult practices, looking beyond conventional media to probe the limits of knowledge. Operating at the thresholds of the rational and irrational, the visible and invisible, his work looks beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the world, locating life and memory in matter itself.