METAMORPHOSIS

METAMORPHOSIS, curated by Livia Klein, unfolds within the liminal reciprocity of body and architecture. The exhibition probes how built structures lose their certainty and begin to echo the instability of perception itself. Drawing from Richard Sennett’s reflections on the disciplined body, the works by Melanie Ebenhoch (*1985, AT) and Paola Siri Renard (*1993, FR) trace how spatial order emerges and unravels—how architecture mediates not only what we see, but how we inhabit. In its fractures, what Mark Fisher terms the eerie surfaces: a quiet dissonance that unsettles the order of things, a sense that matter itself might begin to watch back. The exhibition lingers in this tension between structure and affect, where spatial form turns psychological and the body becomes a site of spatial uncertainty. As Sennett observes in Flesh and Stone, architecture inscribes itself onto the body. It regulates proximity, touch, and the rhythm of movement. Yet the corporeal never remains passive. What was once designed to discipline now starts to breathe, absorb, and eventually transform the structures that seek to contain it. Here, architecture becomes affective matter, mirroring what Anthony Vidler described as the architectural uncanny: spaces haunted by the echoes of the psyche, where the domestic slips into the disquieting. Still, this unease is not without tenderness. In Gaston Bachelard’s sense, the interior remains a vessel for reverie, for the soft persistence of memory. Rooms become cavities of imagination, half-shelter, half-threshold, dissolving into a sensory blur where the mind dwells after the body has moved on. Here, memory is not remembered but felt, when place presses itself into flesh like a faint afterimage. Beyond these edifices of memory, the line between organism and object begins to waver. Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman vision suggests that matter itself might be capable of becoming, of sensing, adapting, even dreaming. In that light, the eerie is not a symptom of fear but of awareness: the recognition that space, too, is alive, that form itself might be watching. What remains is a trembling equilibrium between body and world. Melanie Ebenhoch’s practice unfolds at the threshold between interior and psyche. Her sculptural paintings, resin-based reliefs with convex surfaces resembling fragments, stage domestic environments that hover between still life and spatial illusion, intimacy and estrangement. The recurring elevation at the center, recalling an iris, a doorknob, or a nipple, acts as a point of distortion, pulling the viewer inward while unsettling the gaze. The ongoing tondi work series revisits the pictorial grammar of vanitas painting, yet stripped of its moral resolution. Grapes nearing decay, insects gilding across crystal surfaces, mirrors withholding reflection. Each element operates as an emblem of transformation rather than closure. These objects linger in an intermediate state: neither inert nor alive but animated by a latent vitality. Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich reverberates here as the return of what should have remained hidden: an inversion of homeliness into estrangement. Within Ebenhoch’s constructed settings, familiar objects acquire an unsettling agency: mirrors that refuse reflection, telephones that deny connection, thresholds that are vibrant with unseen presence. This corporeal anxiety borders on the terrain of body horror, not through violence, but through subtle mutation. One might recall Kafka’s Metamorphosis—the transformation not as spectacle but as slow alienation, as the quiet terror of becoming other within one’s own room. Drawing from the devotional intimacy of the Renaissance tondo, the artist reorients the gaze: what was once contemplative becomes voyeuristic, what was sacred becomes sensate. Paola Siri Renard’s practice examines the perception of space as a construct shaped by cultural memory and unconscious codes. Engaging with the architectural legacies of the West, she isolates ornamental fragments from monuments and façades, re-scaling and reassembling them into hybrid forms. Processes of decay, fossilization, and transformation become methods of translation—ways to imagine how cultural and material residues persist across time. Her works function as speculative devices, oscillating between architecture and anatomy, history and fiction, evoking the affective afterlives of the built environment. In (dazzling) garderobe (2023) and muters w (2023), these ideas take sculptural form through fractured micro-architectures composed of acrylic plaster and stainless steel. The ribbed, wing-like structures recall Art Nouveau’s ornamental language, yet their iridescent surfaces suggest something other: camouflage turned to exposure, monument turned to membrane. Both works appear as artifacts from a speculative archaeology, relics of an imagined species or civilization where architecture has merged with the organic. The metallic extensions, reminiscent of surgical tools or prosthetic limbs, suggest a transformation: an eerie intimacy between mechanism and body, between shelter and skin. Following Braidotti’s posthuman thought, Renard’s sculptures envision matter as sentient and mutable, entangled in a process of continuous becoming. They stand as delicate fossils of future memory, echoes of spatial structures that once contained us and are now learning, in turn, to inhabit us. Blending these perspectives, METAMORPHOSIS lingers at the threshold between structure and sensation. The works within the show suggest an architecture that no longer seeks to contain the body but to move with it. If Sennett’s disciplined body once mirrored the order of the city, what emerges here is its inversion: an environment of instability, haunted by the memory of touch. The eerie persists as an undercurrent, a quiet hum of presence within absence. What unfolds is not an ending but a persistence: an echo of form within flux, of architecture dreaming itself into flesh.