In core, Kristina Nagel and Marie Matusz explore how perception is structured, guided, and shifted, and how the visible emerges as a dynamic, mutable constellation. Both positions make the instability of representation tangible within the exhibition and show how image, material, and space generate conditions that shape the act of seeing.

In her photographs, Kristina Nagel (Frankfurt am Main, DE) investigates how perception is shaped by strategies, codes, and assumptions, and how these can be shifted by material and form. Through abstraction, proximity, and alienation, she questions mechanisms of representation and demonstrates how the limitation of information challenges our habits of seeing and destabilizes patterns of recognition. In the presented body of work, leather comes to the fore as surface and texture, functioning operatively rather than iconically. Objects and bodies are transformed into formal elements and structures that mark lines, volumes, and spatial trajectories.

Marie Matusz (Toulouse, FR) focuses on space as a formative element of visibility. Her vitrines and spatial modules create a choreographic order in which volumes, sightlines, and perspectival relations guide perception and render visible the conditions under which seeing is structured. Inside and outside, proximity and distance, position and perspective thus become questions that extend beyond the formal content of the works, revealing how cultural, institutional, and architectural frameworks shape and organize our ways of seeing.

Placing Nagel’s image systems alongside Matusz’ spatial configurations shows that perception is not a passive act. It is relational and constructed: what we experience as identity, proximity, or presence is shaped by the conditions established by the artists, which organize visibility and direct the gaze. The exhibition core reveals to which extent our way of seeing is shaped by regimes of materiality, imagery, and space.