In the Fold of the Sack

In the Fold of the Sack proposes a critical framework in which materials are understood not simply as the substrates of artistic production, but as active agents embedded within systems in relation to artists’ bodies, memories, and positionalities.

Materials are never inert. They bear the traces of labor, social hierarchies, gender normativity, environmental destruction, and geopolitical imbalance, all woven into the ongoing act of making. In this exhibition, artists respond to these layered histories, engaging with matter through gesture and attention. The collective memories are folded into them, as the meanings of materials shift through their bodies and linger in memory.

The exhibition presents artworks in which materials operate as both metaphor and critique, blurring the boundaries between object and system, surface and substrate, content and matter. Rather than aestheticizing scarcity, the works in the exhibition attend to the conditions that produce them: neoliberal logics, global supply chains, and the shifting frameworks of value that shape both materials and lives. In doing so, the exhibition underscores how materiality is inseparable from the systems in which it exists, making visible the entanglements that inform both process and meaning.

Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, video, performance, and assemblage, the exhibition invites viewers into layered conversations around material storytelling—how histories are carried, obscured, or reactivated through matter and the gestures of artists’ bodies. Materiality emerges not as a passive receiver of meaning, but as an active force in its production.

The exhibition unfolds through a constellation of programs, including a performance and a workshop and reading, alongside an artist talk and screening, activating the space as a site of collective inquiry and exchange.

With contributions by: Christoph Conrad, Astrid Didion, Luiza Furtado, JH Gim, Julia S Goodman, Birke Gorm, Abigail Simone Hauwede, Theresa Katharina Horlacher, Yixuan Hu, Hwajung Kim, Julia Kronberger, Alexander Krisa, Irina Lotarevich, Minh Phuong Nguyen, Ebba Sofie Olsson, Anna Pöll, Mara Printz, Michael Reindel, Sanne Luna Scheepmaker, Leon Can Scheiblich, JeeHyun-Elizabeth Son, Younès Ben Slimane, Neda Tabrizi, Lucía Ugena, Zoe Jackson, Cornelis Wuisman Jorgensen, Duannaiyu Wang, Rita Barbro Wilke, and Jiaxi Yang

Curator: Yein Lee