What does it mean to stand on the verge, suspended, not yet tipped over? Verge, at PAW, unfolds along the seam where one state yields while another remains unresolved. Gathering four artistic positions at this edge – between the solid and the fluid, the ground and the air, function and its undoing – the exhibition dwells in the instant before it tips. To verge is not simply to approach a boundary, but to remain within its instability. And yet it is precisely in this not-crossing that matter acquires what Jane Bennett would call an agency of its own. It leans, slips, hesitates, and begins to answer back, while the border itself ceases to be a line that divides and becomes a space thickened by uncertainty, one to be inhabited rather than crossed.

In his sculptural practice, Nino Maaskola (*1983) works with the classical materials and techniques of sculpture: stone, cast metal, and other dense, malleable substances that recur throughout his work. He is less interested in imposing a predetermined form than in how materials organise themselves once a process has been set in motion. Moving beyond an anthropocentric understanding of making, Maaskola allows matter to assert its own agency, emerging through negotiations between artistic intention and material behaviour. The sculptures bend, settle, resist, and ultimately take part in their own making. In Abschied von der Erde IV (2018), a stone hovers in the grip of a forged clamp that tightens rather than releases – a block of sandstone, held by forged and galvanized steel and a lifting strap. The mechanism is simple, its effect is not: the heavier the stone, the firmer the grip. It rises not despite its weight, but because of it. What would ordinarily hold it to the ground becomes the very condition of its ascent. In 800 Tonnen III (2026), weight itself becomes the subject. The two-part sculpture is cast in aluminium, then split apart under a hydraulic press. The fracture runs where the material gives in, along a line the artist can guide but never fully determine. What remains are two halves facing one another across the break, the smooth cast surfaces turned out, the raw edges turned in. The title names a magnitude that exceeds what the body can grasp. At a certain scale, mass slips from lived experience into abstraction, no longer something we can picture or measure against ourselves. The sculpture dwells at exactly this point, where the heaviness that grounds all things passes beyond comprehension.

In his artistic practice and research, Daniel Hölzl (*1994) explores the cyclical nature of matter through mostly site-specific installations. Matter here is never static but caught between states, in periods of decay and renewal. Working primarily with recycled and locally sourced materials, his works engage with the material traces of extraction economies and their entanglement in broader temporal scales. Rather than illustrating ecological concerns, they perform a kind of material thinking, attending to the moment in which one material state turns into another. In INTERMISSION (2025), a spare part for an aircraft wing becomes the ground for an image. It belongs to a model no longer built, no longer in the air; the part itself was never used, kept in reserve, carrying the theoretical potential to be installed and to fly, yet never doing either. Bent and set down, riveted, perforated by maintenance hatches and circular cutouts, it rests upon the ground. Into its curve, Hölzl fits a flexible LED panel that follows the bend of the metal, running a fifteen-minute loop of archival footage from the early days of flight, ending with the first aerial loop in history. Only through the work does the unused part finally come into use. What remains is the interval the title names, neither departure nor arrival but a pause extended into a condition, potential held open and never spent. In the PITOT works (2025), titanium pitot tubes, the instruments that once measured an aircraft’s speed in flight, pierce propellers cast in recycled paraffin wax. Fixed to the wall, the soft wax hangs pierced through, drooping over its support like a slab of meat, the organ of lift caught in a slow surrender of form.

Enya Burger (*1996) works across video, sculpture, and immersive installation, examining the social and epistemic structures that shape contemporary life. Grounded in scientific and theoretical discourse, her practice interrogates the ideology of progress and the boundaries it produces, between bodies and territories, the analog and the digital, those who belong and those kept outside. Across media, Burger works at the edges where these divisions are drawn, held, and undone. Welcome to the Club (2022) greets visitors with a phrase formed from electrified livestock fencing stretched almost to the full height of the wall. At first glance, it reads as innocuous signage; only the faint buzz of the current gives it away, turning language into a charged surface where careless visitors risk a shock. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s writing on the redistribution of soil and territory, the work turns on the irony built into every club: to welcome some is to keep others out. In an age of climate migration and shifting ground, the greeting reveals its edge: “welcome” does not extend to everyone, and certainly not to everyone alike. Landscaping (2026) turns attention inward, to the body as a body of water. The work begins with a microscopic image of the artist’s own bodily fluid, printed on Japan paper, then folded and sewn into an irregular relief. Following the hydrofeminist thought of Astrida Neimanis, for whom all bodies are watery, taking in and releasing liquid in continuous exchange, the work treats fluid not as something contained but as something that passes through and transforms. What emerges resists stable scale: a cosmic landscape, a terrain seen from above, or the microscopic matter of one’s own body. The membrane through which a body absorbs and releases becomes a soft edge rather than a border, intimate and porous, where inside and outside pass into one another. Register I–II (2026) arranges pollen on metal mesh, set into a kind of type case. Drawn from peat archives in which pollen, preserved across centuries, records earlier vegetation and land use, the work reads the ground itself as a document of time. Through cartographic elements, the pollen points to a territory without fixing how it should be read, a border held open rather than drawn.

Abie Franklin (*1995) builds images from raw matter. Across several series, lines and connections in charcoal, tar, copper, cobalt, nickel, and sand form configurations between map, circuit, and territorial system. Running through the works is the question of extraction, of the raw materials drawn from the ground and the systems built to move them. In Subcircuit (2024), rearranging these lines reconfigures topographies and borders again and again, so that no boundary settles into a fixed shape. Lines in the Sand (2026) takes the idiom at its word, a border drawn in the most provisional of grounds. 0.000696 RPM (2026), from the series Falling Seas, names the number of rotations the earth completes each minute. Extraction, acceleration, and the slow turning of the planet meet here, and seen from a great distance, these negotiations resolve into something like a composition. A place under the sun, a modular work, extends the same concern with systems, its elements free to be rearranged. Across all of them, the border appears not as a given line but as something continuously drawn, contested, and drawn again.

The exhibition opens and closes with BYCATCH (2022–ongoing), a collaborative installation by Abie Franklin and Daniel Hölzl. Inflatable tetrapods, partly caught in a safety net, mimic the mass-produced concrete breakwaters developed in the 1950s to hold back coastal erosion, structures whose placement has since choked ecosystems worldwide. Here they are cast not in heavy concrete but in air: the barrier built to divide land from sea turns soft, permeable, almost weightless, a border that no longer holds. It is where each of these works arrives. A stone takes flight on its own weight; an aircraft settles into stillness; a body opens onto water; a line is drawn in sand only to be redrawn. None of them lets a boundary harden into something final. What they hold open instead is the instant before, the place where the solid has not yet become fluid and the heavy not yet weightless, and they ask us to stay there a little longer, in the uncertainty, rather than hurry across.

 — Livia Klein