Lost and Found

Lost and Found / Sofia Defino Leiby, Cyryl Polaczek, Hanna Stiegeler, William Wegman

Monopol, together with Sweetwater Berlin, has the pleasure of presenting works by Sofia Defino Leiby, Cyryl Polaczek, Hanna Stiegeler, and William Wegman during this year’s edition of CONSTELLATIONS.

The protagonists of this exhibition are objects. Simple, familiar objects that populate our daily lives: a ball, a bottle, a book, a bag… Yet here, they are not arranged in the traditional manner of classical still lifes, where beauty or symbolism dictated the composition. Where they were anonymous objects or rather the ideas of objects.

Surely one couldn’t use the term nature morte, the French phrase for still life. Here, devoid of human presence, these objects seem to inhabit a world of their own. Each tells a story, not just of itself but of the person who made it, who used it, who desired it, and who lost it. These stories are not told by people or from the human perspective. Here, the object becomes a subject, and more specifically, a narrative subject.

Objects in this exhibition often appear estranged from their usual function, placed in a different context or scale, they confuse clues, tease us with elusive meanings, subvert our expectations or make fun of us. As in the painting by Cyryl Polaczek, in which we see a flying shoe, glasses, and a book adrift in the sky. What unseen event has cast them into flight? What happened to their owner? The stories of objects are ambiguous, sometimes even absurd, as in William Wegman’s early conceptual photographs, where a menacing pair of scissors with crocodile teeth devours a sheet of paper, and a bowling ball leaves a trail of a bouncing rubber ball behind it.

Sofia Defino Leiby creates 3D models of objects, vividly mimicking the look of their subjects, the digitally created objects seem to arise from a grey contextless space. Looking more closely, the objects reveal unexpected twists and hidden details. While Hanna Stiegeler’s screen prints of open, empty handbags balance on the line between commercial and fine art photography, interconnecting layers of content and creation.

Yet there is nothing extraordinary in this. Objects have always been storytellers. It is exactly those stories that are later reconstructed by archeologists, detectives, and museum workers. What happened here? What traces of the past do they bear? Therefore, assuming that things can tell stories, in order to understand them, one must adopt their perspective, at least for a moment. Ultimately, objects will survive longer than people and will bear witness to our history.