container

Container (2024) was initially intended as a site-specific sculpture. It is composed of a circular steel barricade, an assisted readymade based on a form commonly found on pavements across Berlin. Preserving its original material and scale, one half of the steel structure has been flayed and partially inverted. This new surface is marked by irregularity and directional texture, undermining the impression of an unyielding, fixed state embodied by the barricade’s vernacular form.

Installed in the foyer of a Hermann Henselmann tower, an architectural emblem of GDR-era socialist classicism and its projected optimism, the work engages with Ornament and Crime. This was the exhibition’s title and a reference to Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay, in which he denounced ornament as decadence and violence. Yet Loos’s own buildings, such as the Looshaus in Vienna, often relied on illusion; columns made to appear as solid marble were in fact hollow.

Both the barricade and the structural pillar it engulfs are circumambulatory by nature. Yet in encircling the pillar, the sculpture reverses the logic of the barrier; it gestures not toward exclusion, but toward protection. The breach and inversion open a symbolic passage. This invites a consideration of the tensions between containment and access, surface and structure, and the inherent instability of supposedly fixed architectural forms.