Fragile Realities

There are moments when reality shifts, at first barely perceptibly. Something falls out of balance, and certainties long taken for granted begin to crumble. In this context, fragility does not describe an exceptional state, but rather a fundamental experience of the present.

Fragile Realities brings together artistic practices that address precisely this shift in reality. The works do not attempt to explain crises or offer clear-cut answers. Instead, many engage with fragility through the body, through materials, or through forms of memory. Stability rarely appears as a given, but rather as something that must be constantly reestablished.

The selection of participating galleries follows a conscious curatorial decision: only spaces founded by women gallery owners were invited. This framework functions less as a programmatic theme for the special section than as a structural perspective. It shifts the focus toward curatorial practice, and toward networks and forms of visibility within the art system.

Reiners Contemporary in Marbella presents Raquel Algaba, whose artistic practice approaches history as something unfinished. In Mythos entlang der Äste (Myth Along the Branches), memory is not reconstructed but revealed as a fragile formation. The myth of Odysseus and the Lotophagi serves as the starting point. Forgetting appears not as a distant narrative but as a condition of the present. Algaba’s ceramic bodies appear vulnerable, supported by structures that both hold and constrain them.

Petra Martinetz shows works by Jody Korbach that critically examine contemporary German realities. Korbach is interested in concepts such as home, belonging, and community. Her visual language often employs irony and draws on elements of pop culture and everyday visual aesthetics, which she then subverts. Seemingly light-hearted settings open up political dimensions. Korbach asks how images stabilize social orders and how they can simultaneously undermine them.

The Hamburg gallery Lucia Kaufmann presents works by Clara Lena Langenbach and Katherina Heil. Langenbach works with the motif of the spine as both an anatomical reality and an image of uprightness. Her works present the body as something that must be stabilized and is simultaneously constrained. Katherina Heil approaches the theme through material and time. Stone, printmaking, and spatial installation enter into dialogue. Her works move between geological permanence and media surface. Constellations emerge in which weight and lightness, as well as duration and moment, meet.

Nina Akhobadze and Sarah Ama Duah enter into dialogue at Roberta Keil Gallery in Vienna. Akhobadze’s large-format paintings dispense with clear figuration. Color and surface define the image. Her works emerge from a physical, intuitive process and appear like snapshots of an ongoing event. Sarah Ama Duah combines sculpture, performance, and object-based work in her practice. Her sculptures become carriers of memory and history. In her works, history does not appear as a fixed narrative, but as something constantly being renegotiated.

Charlie Stein and Makiko Harris present their works at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery. Stein’s works address the representation of bodies in a digitally influenced visual culture. The images examine how identity, desire, and vulnerability are formed in a world where bodies are increasingly mediated through filters, screens, and digital aesthetics. Makiko Harris’s works often emerge from the superimposition of different materials and supports: painted surfaces meet metallic structures. This creates pictorial spaces in which surface and material play as important a role as the motif itself. Harris is particularly interested in processes of creation and revision.

The Basel gallery See You Next Tuesday is showing works by the artist Inka ter Haar. In her painting, she develops a visual language that renders psychological states, memories, and inner figures visible. Personal experiences are related to broader social contexts, such as patriarchal structures, violence, environmental destruction, or war. Ter Haar’s works focus in particular on the transgenerational transmission of experiences of violence.

At DOD Gallery, artist Jeehye Song presents paintings that combine everyday experiences, memories, and inner images. The starting point for her works is often personal observations, dreams, or apparently ordinary situations, which she transforms into poetic visual spaces. Figures appear in interiors or landscapes that exist between reality and imagination. Subtly surreal details create an atmosphere of quiet unease. Song’s painting explores how personal experience, memory, and imagination come together in images.

Anahita Sadighi Gallery presents an artistic position that engages intensively with cultural transitions and historical layers. In its program, the Berlin gallery combines contemporary art with historical artifacts and material traces from various cultures. For Fragile Realities, it has developed a presentation in which ancient vessels and historical photographs are placed in relation to the artistic practice of Daniel Butcher. Here, the past does not appear as a closed chapter, but as something constantly being reinterpreted in the present.

Many of the works on display oscillate between instability and potential. Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble,” that is, enduring contradictions rather than seeking quick solutions. The works in this section likewise do not claim stability. They show how reality takes shape through breaks and shifts. Fragile Realities is therefore conceived less as a thesis than as an open field.

Written by curator of the FRAGILE REALITIES section Pola van den Hövel.