With newly commissioned works from Michael Sandford and Antonia Nannt “In the Night Time Bloom” places a magnifying lens over the cityscape building façade—the thin but loaded site which clothes the interior in decor. Thus, through the language of design, the contents of the building are intuitable to the outside observer. Yet, simultaneously, caked in surveillance equipment, this membrane keeps watch over the public at large.
Nannt’s steel sculptures dot the walls and floor of the space: she has cultivated a garden of metal flowers whose petals hang heavy on their round faces. Each is emblazoned with the names of design movements welded in script. The words themselves are so numerous on each floret that here and there petals have fallen prematurely—the weight of history and expectation impossible to contain. Inside some sits fragile coloured glass, revealing the thinness of the flowers’ skin, and nothing but emptiness and white walls beyond. Coated in enamel—the functional material of bath tubs and street signs—they sparkle pleasantly. But the blown up shapes and rustic joins are not tritely comforting like the Art Nouveau stucco of a renovated Altbau. And so Nannt sows a seed of doubt about the rightness we instinctively find in these plant effigies, wrought in inorganic matter for human consumption.
Sandford also puts the verity of the images he uses as his source material into question. The artist’s two new chalk drawings on blackboard are recreations of the views from hacked security cameras which watch over desolate industrial landscapes. Blending an illustrative style that is faithful to form, with the powdery material of chalk whose texture spills over the most true line into dusty oblivion, he renders his images with an eerie combination of certainty and doubt. The sinister quality of his source material—surveillance apparatus that silently open in the darkness to observe more fruitfully—is translated through the authoritative schoolroom chalkboards he draws on.
Both Sandford and Nannt are keenly attuned to the plasticity of truth, and the ways in which it is collectively decided upon by those in power through image, architecture, and symbol. By probing the thickness of these external skins, they offer a view from both sides of the façade, recognising that as we look out, we are also, always, looking in.
Curated by
Ella Krivanek
at Holden Garage, Berlin
until August 14, 2023