Forms of Alignment

Five artistic practices engage with space, language, imagery, materials, and social structures. Their works explore relationships not only as harmonious connections but also as fragile, sometimes contradictory negotiations.

Relationships appear as something that is not simply a given, but must be established, sustained, protected, limited, and constantly renegotiated. It is precisely in these processes that ambivalences emerge: closeness can mean protection, but it can also create exclusion; alignment can provide orientation while simultaneously revealing hierarchies and dependencies.

The listed exhibition venue is not merely a backdrop but an active part of the exhibition. Its spatial, historical, and institutional conditions—historic monument, public space, protection, threshold, fragment, and reconstruction—are taken seriously as material. The works engage with these conditions, react to them, contradict them, or shift their meaning. In this way, a structure emerges in which the present and history do not appear separate from one another but rather overlap.

Affiliations are inevitably read into this space. However, they do not constitute the curatorial organizing principle. What is decisive, rather, is which questions the individual works raise, which relationships they establish, and which tensions they reveal and withstand. Forms of Alignment therefore conceives of the exhibition not as a closed space of unambiguous statements, but as a place of encounter, friction, and reordering.

The title refers to different forms of alignment: physical, social, political, spatial, and institutional constellations. “Alignment” here signifies neither complete agreement nor harmonious unity. Rather, it refers to a provisional relationship formed through convergence, displacement, resistance, and interdependence.