Before sculpture takes on any kind of form, it is a position. A declaration that something is actually there (and everything else is not). A block, a weight, a curve, a corner cut too sharp or too slow (add whatever you want). An object that does nothing, except insist on its own existence. It doesn’t show, it occupies. It doesn’t represent, it stands.

It’s happened to us, in our many visits to artists’ studios, to spend several minutes in front of a work composed of three stones (guess which artist we’re talking about). Placed with the surgical calm of someone who knows that two millimeters are enough to ruin everything. They weren’t beautiful, nor “comfortable” to look at, but together, they held the space hostage. We thought, maybe this is exactly what sculpture does, sometimes. It says nothing, but forces the environment to declare itself.

As if by shifting a single object, even the space around it becomes self-aware (and of course, we do too, standing inside the room).

There’s no message, no needless allegory, only the certainty that someone decided where to put something, and that once it’s in front of you, you can’t possibly pretend not to see it.

There is something irredeemably inert in the object. We touch it, move it, measure it. Yet the very act of handling it marks its domestication. Sculpture, perhaps more than any other medium, bears the risk of consensus: it appears stable, complete, assertive. And for this reason, it has always been viewed with suspicion.

The twentieth century carried out a long and deliberate dismantling of sculpture, conceptually, symbolically, and linguistically. It wasn’t a rejection of matter per se, but a removal of its aura. When Duchamp, in 1917, flips a urinal and presents it as art, he is not merely redrawing the boundaries of artistic practice. He is introducing an asymmetry that forever contaminates the object. Sculpture is no longer what is shaped, but what is selected, pointed at, displaced. No longer creation, but choice.

In 1969, Joseph Kosuth wrote that “art is the definition of art.” The artwork ceases to be an extension of the body and becomes an extension of language. Within this framework, sculpture turns into an obstacle, a material interference in a conceptual field. The artistic gesture migrates to the realm of propositions, systems, enunciations. It is no coincidence that works like One and Three Chairs become paradigmatic: the chair as object, as word, as image. But in the end, nothing remains of sculpture except its semiotic potential. (…)

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We’ve often found ourselves wondering what happens to large-scale installations once they’re dismantled. Not the portable kind, nor those conceived to be recreated elsewhere, but the massive, site-specific, time-bound constructions that seem impossible to preserve. When the exhibition ends, where do these works go to die? What remains of an installation that, by nature, resists both conservation and collection, other than documentation?

It’s an unsettling question, because it challenges the symbolic economy of contemporary art: can we truly accept that a work simply disappears? Or worse, that it gets destroyed, disassembled, forgotten? This tension between visibility and disappearance, between monumentality and material fragility, led us (once again) to Urs Fischer.

Fischer operates precisely on this edge. His works are not built to last, nor to be owned. They are radical sculptural gestures, often monumental in scale, yet rooted in impermanence, perishability, even absurdity. Whether it’s a melting room, an everyday object made monstrous, or a human figure in wax destined to slowly dissolve, everything in his practice points to an uncomfortable truth: the work is not made to remain, but to give way. (…)

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In recent decades, contemporary art has progressively dismantled the long-standing assumptions of fixity and localization that, for centuries, structured the relationship between the artwork and its spatial context. The exhibited object, once anchored to a specific site, has yielded to installational, environmental, and immaterial dispositifs that redefine the perceptual framework of the visitor. Within this shift, the notion of site-specificity has undergone a profound reconfiguration: no longer a physical tether between work and place, but the production of experiential conditions in which the site itself emerges as the outcome of a process.

It is within this framework that tools such as Google Genie 3, a world model capable of generating interactive three-dimensional environments from simple textual input, assert themselves not as mere technological upgrades, but as points of conceptual rupture. The operation is not the simulation of an existing context; what Genie 3 produces is an ontologically autonomous space, non-derivative, capable of establishing a perceptual and relational continuum without geographic coordinates, without the constraints of physical presence, and without the necessity of any supporting materiality.

We enjoyed imagining this condition as one that could offer possibilities for a radical alternative to the logic of the physical event. The exhibition experience, liberated from the logistical constraints of co-presence, becomes a generative act, capable of happening anywhere, at any time, repeatable yet always unique in its specific configuration. The viewer is no longer a body moving through a predefined space, but an active agent who inhabits and co-constructs a space in flux, dissolving traditional boundaries between artwork, context, and reception.

From this perspective, Genie 3 emerges as an environmental construction device that operates simultaneously on perceptual, cognitive, and curatorial levels, reshaping not only the modes of engagement, but the very ontology of the exhibition space itself.

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“Love is a minefield: you walk in dancing, hoping not to blow up.”
That was the thought that struck us as we stepped into the PAC that afternoon, confronted by the first black mirrored surfaces of Love Vigilantes. More than any other room, that one pulsed with the heavy silence of an absence: Alessandro Codagnone, one half of the Lovett/Codagnone duo, no longer present. And yet, this exhibition does not sound like a eulogy. It’s something else entirely, a persistent evocation, an invitation to step back into a conversation that’s uncomfortable but essential. Where love is a threat in disguise, and fragility flickers like a screaming neon sign. What remains of desire when it’s laid bare before public judgment? What becomes of the queer body when placed at the center of institutional gaze, between wire fences and polished photography? I Only Want You to Love Me sounds like a sweet ultimatum, but with every step through the show, it becomes clearer: love here is a battlefield. (…)

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There’s a fragile line between what binds us and what separates us. It’s made of skin, but also of cables, seams, and fractures. Alexandra Bircken stretches that line, crumples it, slices and re-stitches it throughout the pulsating, antiseptic rooms of Kunsthaus Biel. Upon entering, it’s not a single artwork that strikes first, but rather an impression: that my own body, reflected in space, is being questioned. What if the body were nothing more than a system of signs? An interface, a threshold, a surface between the self and the world?

The title, Soma Sema Soma, resonates like an epigraph etched into flesh. Soma, the body. Sema, the sign. And again Soma. A looping circuit of matter and meaning. This oscillation defines the exhibition’s core: the tension between what we are and what we appear to be, between lived flesh and its symbolic mise-en-scène. And so the visit begins, like a poetic autopsy.

Kunsthaus Biel here becomes a dissected organism. The layout of the works, precise, non-didactic, guides the eye along a path that doesn’t dictate but insinuates. The lighting is cold, surgical; it casts shadows that feel like emotional diagrams. Visitors move slowly, as though each sculpture demands a kind of reverent pause. Every step is both an approach and a retreat.

The rooms don’t tell a linear story but rather resemble a network, better, a dispersed nervous system. Twisted cables, torn fabrics, oxidized metals and epidermal surfaces cohabit in a discontinuous, organic ensemble. The Vitrines (I–V), scattered like visual interludes, collect fragments of the artist’s process: materials, notes, photographs. They act like curatorial synapses, mental connections made visible. Thought becomes object, and vice versa. (…)

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When the old is dying and the new delays, a counter-movement rises in the infrathin of the now. Outside the prestige ecosystems of museums, biennials, and the increasing artist-run spaces, the figure of the independent curator moves on unsteady grounds marked by precarity given by the ongoing lack of structural support. Independent (emerging) curators, despite being essential interlocutors in contemporary art discourse, often navigate terrains of exclusion when unable to access funding mechanisms, artistic residencies, and established curatorial development pipelines.

The “independent” curator is yet a luring figure in contemporary culture: nimble, inventive, self-authoring and so malleable. Yet in practice, independence sometimes means invisibility. The myth of autonomy obscures the reality of under-compensation, overwork, and lack of safety nets. Even within so-called alternative spaces, curators are often marginal – perceived as supplementary to the “real work” of artistic production, or viewed as opportunistic intermediaries. This outlook not only undermines the specificity of curatorial labor, but erases the political, emotional, and infrastructural work that independent curators do every day. Writing, budgeting, facilitating, advocating, mentoring, mediating, none of this is “just admin.” These are all at the core of curating, often developed at the margins.

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Walking toward Neue Alte Brücke on a softly dusty German afternoon, we found ourselves thinking about how silence can wound more deeply than a raised voice. What shape does shame take? Is it a sound? A smell? Perhaps a texture? That question echoed quietly as we crossed the threshold of Yvo Cho’s exhibition, untitled but by no means weightless, on view in Frankfurt from June 28 to August 22, 2025, where everything appears withheld, yet nothing forgiven. In the watched half-light of that space, where the white walls do not comfort but keep watch, we encountered a void not asking to be filled, but to be heard.

Here, copper doesn’t gleam, it groans.
Just a handful of objects. But enough to conjure generations of muffled laughter, quiet tears, childhoods flayed by the cruelty of custom.

The gallery itself, stripped down to the point of suspicion, receives visitors like a room left behind in a will: white walls, frosted windows filtering light like a memory unwilling to come fully into focus. On the left, a nearly empty white shelf holds a dark object, a book perhaps, or an abandoned notebook, serving as a cryptic prelude.

The eye is then drawn, inevitably, to the far end of the room, where two works rest with their own silent gravity: hand-woven copper replicas of ki, traditional Korean winnowing baskets used to separate rice from chaff. But here, grain is not separated from husk, trauma is braided into form, metal fused to memory. (…)

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