Connections – Gabriel Kuri

"Looking at the bookshelf across my table I noticed Gabriel Kuri’s catalogue Sorted/Resorted published for his Wiels exhibition. Home office has advantages and disadvantages. As work is for the most part done remotely, on a computer far from the offices, my surroundings have become richer, alive. All the objects collected in more than a decades start to speak again.

I like to listen to these objects – to reconnect with the reality in which I found them. It is something I’ve always liked since I was going to the beach in summer: I found the things people left in the sand very fascinating – especially because they were also completely out of context. It was an idiosyncratic place, a desert land.

When I met Gabriel in 2015 for his most recent solo exhibition at the gallery, this sense of research was activated in the same way. Among the works he made, there was a series of sculptures that were hosting found objects. In the heat of the summer, I was looking for a coffee cup, the one you use to take the coffee with you, and you realize that a plain one, the one that contains just the right sense he was looking for did not exist in Kreuzberg, at least in the surrounding 10 blocks or so of his studio at the time.

This research became a way to map the city and ordering a coffe-to-go was no longer about the taste of the coffee but about the shape of the cup." – Emiliano Pistacchi