iffy [ˈɪfi]

In times increasingly shaped by digital images, algorithmic selection processes, and media-generated realities, truth is losing its presumed stability. What appears real, natural, or authentic is always also the result of translation, framing, and repetition. The exhibition iffy [ˈɪfi] examines this condition not merely as a crisis of facts, but as a profound destabilisation of perception. At its centre is the question of how reality is produced - through images and technical systems, but equally through historical narratives, cultural categories, and material orders. The title iffy [ˈɪfi] describes something questionable, uncertain, or only conditionally reliable. At the same time, it refers to the English word “if”: to a condition that determines which version of reality becomes visible and credible. The exhibition understands ambiguity not as a deficit, but as a method. It focuses on transitional zones in which seemingly clear categories become unstable: between original and representation, physical and digital bodies, nature and culture, interior and exterior. In Younsik Kim’s kinetic works “0g Filed with 12philars” and “The Ghost Touch,” the apparent lightness of digital images encounters the inertia of material bodies. Kim translates the frictionless scrolling of digital interfaces into mechanical processes made of glass, metal, motors, and displays. What appears immediate and immaterial on screen becomes perceptible as movement marked by weight, resistance, repetition, and technical vulnerability. His sculptures demonstrate that digital reality is by no means disembodied. Behind every image lie hardware, energy, labour, and material infrastructures. At the same time, the works point to a loss: when a sculpture is translated into a circulating photograph, scale, texture and spatial presence disappear. The image does not replace the object, yet it increasingly begins to determine how the object is perceived. Maxine Weiss’s “Agave Works” likewise address bodies whose meanings change through migration and shifts in context. Agave americana was brought from Mexico to Europe in the course of colonial expansion, initially cultivated as an object of botanical study and representation, and is now classified as an invasive species in parts of southern France. In meticulously worked leaves, dried over a period of several months, vegetal, animal, and industrial appearances overlap. They evoke skin, armour, or metal and thereby resist unambiguous classification. The works ask who determines which species are considered native, worthy of protection, useful, or invasive. Nature appears here not as an original counterpart to culture, but as a category produced historically, politically, and materially. Neringa Vasiliauskaitė’s works from the series “Parallelräume” extend this instability into the realm of spatial perception. Her photographic objects show washbasins set against a seemingly boundless expanse of ocean. Functional interiors, bodily care, and intimate everyday architectures abruptly encounter the horizon and open sea. The images appear at once documentary and improbable. Mirrors, glass, photographic surfaces, and metal framing overlap, making it unclear where physical space ends and pictorial space begins. The familiar order of inside and outside, surface and depth, begins to waver. What connects the positions in iffy [ˈɪfi] is less a search for truth than an investigation into the conditions under which it is produced. The works by Younsik Kim, Maxine Weiss and Neringa Vasiliauskaitė show how materiality, bodies, nature, and images alike become negotiable constructions in the digital age, and how their relationship to reality is continually shifting. Ambiguity appears not as a lack of certainty, but as a precondition for critical perception: as a means of unsettling established readings, returning representations to their material conditions, and sharpening the awareness of the interstitial spaces in which meaning emerges. In this sense, uncertainty is understood not as a condition to be overcome, but as an aesthetic and epistemological potential that counters the simplification of complex realities with an open and multilayered experience.