"As I stand in the bright white foyer of carlier | gebauer, the archway to the gallery looms ahead like a yawning mouth. Crossing into Pakui Hardware 's 'Thresholds,' I step onto what might be the factory floor of a futuristic mad-mechanic's workshop or the boiler room in the bowels of an alien spaceship adrift in some imagined cosmos. Mechanical arms extend and retract in steady and deliberate rhythms, periodically releasing bursts of pressurized air with a sudden head-turning pneumatic hiss."
"Four strange structures occupy the room, similar but different enough to perhaps be prototypes of an intriguing new invention. There is a sense of having entered a showroom as they each occupy their own corner of the space, positioned at a quarter-turn to each other, offering a comprehensive impression of these magnificent beasts from every angle. A hush falls over my inner monologue, reminiscent of the wonder of a TV studio audience following the reveal of a state-of-the-art sports car."
"In each instance, a stainless steel tripod supports a telescopic limb, at the end of which a blown-glass phallus is affixed, its form recalling the alien biomorphism of H.R. Giger. Held out like a fist, a shield or a probe of some sort and pushed forward with methodical persistence, testing the pliancy of a taut, skinlike textile stretched tight like a sail, it tentatively probes the membrane before retreating."
A gallery installation presents four mechanized structures arranged like prototypes, each occupying a corner and offering full views. Stainless-steel tripods support telescopic limbs topped with blown-glass, biomorphic forms that methodically extend and retract. The appendages probe a taut, skinlike textile, producing periodic pneumatic hisses that shift from startling to meditative. The movements read as simultaneously tentative and persistent, generating an uneasy but non-threatening equilibrium between probing and resistance. The configuration evokes showroom spectacle, industrial and alien references, and erotic undertones. The title frames these works as thresholds—literal and metaphorical filters defining interior and exterior, self and other.
Read at Berlin Art Link
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