Unit
Pforte, Berlin DE

At the heart of Shirin Sabahi’s artistic practice lies a steady, sometimes years-long return to particular places and their conditions. Her residential building in Kreuzberg, Berlin is one such site. Central to her engagement with it is the privatization and renovation of the housing block and its rooftop extension between 2019 and 2022, viewed through the lens of a progressively deregulated, top-down approach to Berlin’s real estate. The building’s fate recurs across a number of Sabahi’s works ranging from photographs, a short film, a series of readymade sculptures, and her collaborative Plinth series (2021–ongoing): paper sculptures of scale-model houses by Sabahi, topped by invited artists with wayward objects as “hats.”

The exhibition at Pforte is inspired by the artist’s house as well. Its eponymous center sculpture Unit (2026) is based on a staging kitchen made from cardboard — set in a model apartment in the half-renovated building — that Sabahi encountered during an open house hosted by the property developers. She repurposes the modules of the acquired dummy as ready-mades. Janus-faced cabinets, ovens, and extractor hoods at a 1:1 scale are stacked vertically in the middle of the small room at Pforte, which itself matches the dimensions of the make-believe kitchen in Kreuzberg. The paper model — in particular its photorealistic surfaces, designed through the erasure of anything individual and lived-in — becomes the protagonist here. Its uncanny, pictorial arrangement evokes an appliance store, a sound system — with distant echoes of Sabahi’s filmic practice — or a Marvel Comics transformer.

The logic of vertical assembly is carried through in the ceramic tiles that serve as feet to the sculpture. They are emblematic of Sabahi’s attention to the subtle and the unnoticeable. In conversation, Sabahi references kitchen cabinets and crevices as popular hiding places for valuable items, exploiting the quotidian setting to hide away the unique. The colorful tiles work with this. Though they may be sourced from a sample catalog, they are also reminiscent of efforts to personalize homes. They are stacked on top of one another, departing from the grid of their usual assembly, as do the kitchen units carried above them.

The sculpture doubles as a display system for Sabahi’s photographs, showing foiled up windows of her flat during construction. The prints are mounted on aluminum plates that lean or lay on the sculpture. In the two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, real aluminum meets its image on a paper fridge or a stove. Still, the sculptural and photographic works follow a divergent agenda: The ready-mades echo a photogrammetric process in which all surfaces are smoothed out and emptied of their interiority, challenging the kitchen as a site of livelihood. The photographs of blurred windowpanes, trapped dust, and humidity break these blank surfaces.

The light seeping through the windows in the photographs is returning as a motive in an instalment of Sabahi’s serial work Window Session (2016–ongoing). Its tinted foils reference the practice of taping windows providing stability during crises such as wars and typhoon seasons. For Unit, a UV-filtering foil is used, refracting light in one direction while taking it away in the other. The room transforms, now hazier, smaller. Pforte becomes the house in Kreuzberg itself, covered in tarpaulins and under construction.

Since the completion of the roof extension, said building’s pebbledash cladding and recognizable yellow window frames have been buried under the new grey and white façade to match the new floor laid on top. German has a humorous word for this: Verschlimmbesserung, a “making up” that makes things worse. This is common practice in real estate flipping: sell on first impression, with a modern, ultra-standardized, fit-for-all “solution.”

Unit upends this practice by atomizing and restructuring precisely this first impression. To do so, the exhibition plays with typological connotations: The unit is interchangeable, modular, normative, a 1:1 model. The unitary is an apartment block made uniform, a multi-part kitchen piled to become one evocative whole. The unique is a tile underfoot or hiding in a crevice. All three, stacked or folded into each other.

- Cara Michel

Works

Unit
2026. Flexo print on corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, velcro, polished stainless steel, 295 x 65 x 185 cm in total

Untitled
2021, 2026. Inkjet prints on baryta paper mounted on aluminum, 64.5 x 47.5 cm, 64 x 46.6 cm, 26 x 19 cm, 60.1 x 49 cm

Untitled
2022, 2026. Inkjet print on baryta paper mounted on aluminum, 55.5 x 43.5 cm

Picked Clean (Fragments)
2026. Cardboard, polyurethane foam, satin, velvet, 9-carat white gold, dimensions variable, 6 x 8 x 5.5 cm in total

Window Session (Danziger Str. 101, 10405 Berlin)
2026. UV-blocking film applied on eight window panes, 168 x 130 cm and 115 x 156 cm

See