Introduction

In his first exhibition at Esther Schipper, Gabriel Kuri shows a group of new sculptures.

A blank bamboo rod extends vertically from the space’s central point, running symmetrically down towards the floor and up to the ceiling. The serial progression of the segments into infinity is limited by the boundaries of the gallery space. Between the ends of the rod, a colour scale spans the full height of the room on a wide strip of fabric: An immediate indexation of possibilities as a consummation of all desire. The scale’s quantification in terms of size is accompanied by a running list of international colour providing companies. With the help of privatised codes, every shade, every nuance of colour can now be called up, communicated and exchanged as an international equivalent. The totality of colours is finite and thus infinitely reproducible.

On a table still inside its cardboard packaging, casually laid across on two folding chairs, a reconstruction of the remains of a meal including plates and paper cups is arranged as a profane still life: leftover chips, baklava and ice tea. The accelerated time of consumerism, in which everything is purchased as potential rubbish, seems to have been brought to a standstill. These leftovers, lying on the cardboard box, are invested with an invisible amount of work that sets them aside from their everyday surroundings. An equivalent sighting is at work in the cast of a rock wrapping around the corner of the gallery. An old pair of shoes, a box and a roll of adhesive tape appear to have grown into the hard stone. These discarded objects, still showing traces of use, are accorded surreally long life, causing them to figure as a potential fossil.

Just as the principle of industrial reproduction appears inscribed in the regular segmenting of the bamboo rod, the objects are haunted by an eerie time of nature in whose cycles they do not simply disappear, instead leading a peculiar second life behind the back of the buyer in which they outlive their form as mere moments in the flow of capital.

In the gallery’s smaller room, against the fictitious infinity of a curved white backdrop, a small group of objects is arranged. Equipped with an awkward concrete base, like uprooted trees, IKEA wastepaper bins are stacked to form symmetrical hollow volumes. The thin steel mesh of the cylindrical objects iridesces in the moving eyes of the viewer. As the content of these bins repurposed as showcases, a twig, some twisted acrylic sheeting, or a garish strip of plastic become a sort of modest chimeras.