With newly commissioned works from Michael Sandford and Antonia Nannt “Within the Evening Time Bloom” locations a magnifying lens over the cityscape constructing façade—the skinny however loaded website which garments the inside in decor. Thus, via the language of design, the contents of the constructing are intuitable to the skin observer. But, concurrently, caked in surveillance gear, this membrane retains watch over the general public at massive.

Nannt’s metal sculptures dot the partitions and ground of the house: she has cultivated a backyard of steel flowers whose petals dangle heavy on their spherical faces. Every is emblazoned with the names of design actions welded in script. The phrases themselves are so quite a few on every floret that right here and there petals have fallen prematurely—the burden of historical past and expectation not possible to comprise. Inside some sits fragile colored glass, revealing the thinness of the flowers’ pores and skin, and nothing however vacancy and white partitions past. Coated in enamel—the useful materials of tub tubs and avenue indicators—they sparkle pleasantly. However the blown up shapes and rustic joins should not tritely comforting just like the Artwork Nouveau stucco of a renovated Altbau. And so Nannt sows a seed of doubt concerning the rightness we instinctively discover in these plant effigies, wrought in inorganic matter for human consumption.

Sandford additionally places the verity of the photographs he makes use of as his supply materials into query. The artist’s two new chalk drawings on blackboard are recreations of the views from hacked safety cameras which watch over desolate industrial landscapes. Mixing an illustrative model that’s trustworthy to kind, with the powdery materials of chalk whose texture spills over essentially the most true line into dusty oblivion, he renders his photos with an eerie mixture of certainty and doubt. The sinister high quality of his supply materials—surveillance equipment that silently open within the darkness to look at extra fruitfully—is translated via the authoritative schoolroom chalkboards he attracts on.

Each Sandford and Nannt are keenly attuned to the plasticity of fact, and the methods by which it’s collectively determined upon by these in energy via picture, structure, and image. By probing the thickness of those exterior skins, they provide a view from each side of the façade, recognising that as we glance out, we’re additionally, all the time, trying in.

Curated by
Ella Krivanek

at Holden Storage, Berlin
till August 14, 2023