Hors-les-Murs
Mathilde Albouy → Possibly Sometime Tomorrow
May 22nd - June 29th, 2025
Mathilde Albouy
Group show "Living rooms" curator Tiffany Dornoy Rezaei
Possibly Sometime Tomorrow, Paris
The show will inlcude works by Mathilde Albouy, Sofie Bonilla Otoya, Sanya Kantarovsky, Dozie Kanu, Tarik Kiswanson, Winnie Mo Rielly, Shahryar Nashat and Ser Serpas.
“Living Rooms" delves into the intimate relationship between self and space. The exhibition contemplates the imprint of the being upon its surroundings, questioning the limits of the mind. How does psychic residue dissolve into walls? How do physical structure and mental space interact?
The exhibited artworks inhabit the liminal space between place and subject, conjuring meaning between the two. They evoke muted ghosts, latent projections, and lasting traces. They draw the eye to the concealed, materializing memories, bringing the outside in, storing remnants, transforming artifacts into witnesses and solidifying the ephemeral.”
As memory breathes and presence lingers, form becomes content, and the frame turns into skin. Here, space is the flesh of the world—a weave of matter and memory, perception and place—all pulsating simultaneously.
Above the front door, a wall pushes back its limits. From its silent density, a formless presence watches over the comings and goings, the frontier between outside and inside. Winnie Mo Rielly’s work explores inhabited spaces where body and architecture intermingle, and where skin and surface merge within cramped interiors. She examines the thresholds of identity in domestic spaces: how the self moves, seeps through cracks, disappears into nooks and crannies, and fuses with objects. The body is no longer an isolated form but a dispersed presence. Her work shapes memory into matter—sculptures in which intimacy becomes landscape, and landscape becomes a sensitive experience of the self.
Erected on a plinth, an intimate theatre stages the embrace of sharp silhouettes confronted with their own reflection. It is a dream of omniscience granted by the glass walls that enclose a tense scene—poised between confrontation and desire—where the gaze oscillates between voyeurism and involuntary witnessing.
A little further on, a hairpin—stretched to human scale and sharpened like a weapon—stands like a totem. An ordinary, intimate object that is both ornament and instrument of control, You’re still here exists in a state of tension: between care and constraint, femininity and power, discretion and threat.
By sculpting everyday objects, Mathilde Albouy interrogates their performative nature and symbolic weight. Far from fetishising the object, her work explores how domestic design inscribes bodies into social space.
Sofía Bonilla Otoya’s tinted silk curtains neither fully close nor completely protect. As fluid partitions, they separate without severing. Eucalyptus is boiled into steam—to rub the body, to bring it back to the skin. Silk is vulnerable, mutable, responsive to its surroundings. Catálogo de razones is a collection of possibilities—unique, fleeting reactions. Here, variations are arranged in a line, like a fraudulent gradation, like segments of a curtain, fragments of thought. The whole stands like a wall filled with air—a separation that acts as a sensory premise rather than an architectural solution. It evokes the divisions of the mind: hypotheses, never certainties.
Dozie Kanu’s Headboard (imagine breathing) and Headboard (bracing for shitty response) extend his sculptural practice of repurposing everyday objects, blurring the boundaries between art and functionality to question how objects are socially coded. Found furniture, overlooked materials, and industrial components—steeped in popular culture—form recontextualised assemblages. For this exhibition, he produced two interlinked pieces in Paris: one diverted, the other reconfigured.
The headboard, a familiar element of the domestic sphere, is dismantled, exposed, laid bare, and put to the test—as if to restore its latent material memory and poetics. Powerful in their fragility, the works become vessels for a fragmented narrative, exploring the legacy and memory of objects and their ability to acquire new meanings as they transition from private settings to public space.
Tarik Kiswanson’s resin floor holds a spatial memory: the floor plan of his family’s childhood flat in a social housing complex on the outskirts of Halmstad, Sweden. Built in the late 1970s to house migrant families, the poorly designed and rapidly deteriorating tower block was demolished in the early 2000s. The container—neither fully transparent nor fully opaque—preserves a diasporic memory that is both fragile and persistent. Here, domestic topography becomes a medium for evoking a vanished place, but above all, a shared moment in time. Anamnesis is a composite memory: conceived by the artist and his three sisters, it reflects a shared understanding of collective memory shaped by differing perceptions. A miniature monument to a lost social structure, it encapsulates the ambiguity inherent in migratory trajectories—a home that was both inhabited and transitory, a memory anchored in a space that no longer exists.
On the wall, Sanya Kantarovsky’s Insect Ballet depicts the movements of a ballet dancer performing the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s hero, into a monstrous insect in the middle of his flat. Kantarovsky’s work explores constrained territories—internal, mental, and social—where mechanisms of domination, desire, and emotional overflow are re-enacted.
This new piece, trapped within its own framework, unfolds a dance of decadence, a dysfunctional ballet where graceful movements are shattered by the rough edges of reality. It reveals a struggle between the bourgeois fantasy of control over an interior—both domestic and psychic—that is orderly, clean, and functional, and the irreducible instability of the living: organic, shapeless, and chaotic.
Pouches of bodily fluids and urine pile up and rest within a rigid frame—suspended, a pictorial flesh. Shahryar Nashat presents urine as a sculptural material, revealing a raw intimacy: a body that is absent yet intensely present through what it produces. Wounds, vulnerability, and thetesting of desire and the body through disgust are recurring themes in his work. Love_27.JPEG materialises what is not: not love itself, but its compressed image; not presence, but one of its forms—absence. The installation engages with fluids, the envelope, intimacy, rest, consumption, and residue. Nashat explores an aesthetic of lack, where the art object simultaneously becomes relic, trace, and discard: preserving remains, even those disparaged, as a refusal of the logic of erasure or oblivion.
Ser Serpas brings the outside in, blending two material binaries: the domestic and the urban, the massive and the vulnerable. Driven by a bodily syntax that fully engages gesture, gravity, and physicality, she creates sculptures for this project from objects abandoned in the streets of the 20th arrondissement. Nothing is fixed; everything is in tension, held together by friction, stacking, interpenetration, and collisions. Her method of creation relies solely on what the body can transport, manipulate, and hold together—with no tools other than itself. The act of assembly becomes language, choice, dance, struggle, and an embrace with matter. In transit and in a perpetual state of transition, these fragile yet imposing works could collapse at any moment.
Tiffany Dornoy Rezaei
Mathilde Albouy
You’re still here, 2025
Poplar, beeswax
63 x 31 1/2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris
© Raphaël Massart
