Michael Sailstorfer: Pull the Rug

One of the defining experiences of our time is the erosion of certainty. Political structures, economic relationships, technological developments, and ecological systems no longer appear as reliable constants, but rather as forces in a state of perpetual transformation. It is no longer isolated crises that shape our perception of the present; instead, we have come to inhabit a reality in which the very ground beneath our feet seems liable to shift at any moment.

Few artists translate this experience into a spatial and sensory encounter with the precision and intensity of Michael Sailstorfer. For many years, he has expanded the notion of sculpture to encompass phenomena such as movement, duration, sound, scent, and disappearance. Rather than merely representing the world, Sailstorfer’s works construct experimental settings in which their underlying conditions become immediately perceptible.

›Pull the Rug‹ advances this approach with uncompromising rigor. Here, visitors will have the ground—quite literally—pulled from beneath their feet. At regular intervals, a gallery attendant will remove one of the paving stones forming the floor of the first exhibition space and »feed« it through a narrow slit into a second room that remains inaccessible to the public. There, a custom-built mechanism will accelerate the stone before hurling it against a wall. Dust, noise, and vibrations will reverberate back into the gallery, while only the consequences of a process whose actual workings remain concealed become perceptible. It is precisely in this withdrawal from view that the work will derive its force. Sailstorfer does not illustrate uncertainty; he produces it. Stability reveals itself to be nothing more than a temporary condition.

A publication documenting the evolution of the installation will be released on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing.