SOFT COLLAPSE

There are moments when objects begin to distance them‐ selves from us. They remain in place, familiar in outline yet strangely altered, as if they had made a quiet decision that escaped our attention. They seem to withdraw; spaces subt‐ ly shift their internal logic; materials begin to assert a langua‐ ge that is no longer ours. The exhibition SOFT COLLAPSE opens a site in which things cease to be mere instruments and instead begin to respond on their own terms, with a presence that feels deliberate and self‐possessed. Gabriela Kobus examines how spatial, social and symbolic structures shape bodies and subjects, revealing the cons‐ tant overlap of control and vulnerability. Her forms act as nodes of relation, condensations of history and present that make visible how environments imprint themselves on us. In works such as a glass floor installation, she places viewers in a state of heightened awareness: each step becomes mea‐ sured, each movement cautious, as if the space were quiet‐ ly rewriting its own rules. Kobus’s practice exposes the fra‐ gile negotiations between human agency and the systems that surround us, inviting us to sense how power circula‐ tes through materials, surfaces and the very act of moving through a room. Rimma Arslanov, whose practice is shaped by architectural language and her biographical movements between Taji‐ kistan, Uzbekistan, Israel and Germany, works at the tension between old and new, beauty and brutality, the organic and the artificial. Her cabinet paintings transform a familiar pie‐ ce of furniture into a vessel for an unruly inner life. Through painting, the cupboard becomes a fragile, almost breathing system that no longer simply stores or conceals but carries a contradictory vitality. Arslanov’s works reveal how domestic objects can shift into something uncanny, something that holds memory, displacement and desire within its altered surfaces. Together, the works of Kobus and Arslanov create a space in which familiar structures begin to tremble, materials slow our movements, and objects quietly assert their own agen‐ cy. SOFT COLLAPSE invites viewers to linger in this subtle in‐ stability, to sense how the world of things bends, resists and responds, and how we, in turn, are shaped by these shifts.