Walk, Talk, Write, Go

DOOM SPA, Berlin

Shirin Sabahi’s in-situ installations Window Session (since 2016) reverses the motif of taped windows, used during wars, typhoon seasons, and in earthquake-prone regions. To this day, citizens in crises zones use tape as protection against shattering glass. Here, the artist intervenes in the architecture of this West Berlin building, underscoring its precarity, perhaps as a space in-between. Sabahi’s sculpture series Plinth, draw upon the architectural element of roof extensions—sold in Berlin as a resolution to the crisis in housing, but in reality a byproduct of gentrification and grounded in the patronage of multinational business. Sabahi, partly inspired by the experience of living under such a construction site, translates the top-bottom relationship with recourse to the motif of a “hat,” asking several Berlin-based artists (in this case Marina Pinsky) to conceive made-to-measure hats for her constructed building plinths. The only specification—which befittingly reads like an omen—is: “stay clear of solutions.” The building-plinths and the artworks atop them foreground and equate the value markets of art, architecture, and real estate. The apparatus and loci of value production are also reflected in Glued House. The print is a studio byproduct of the Plinth series, where by chance a silhouette of a building is developed.