Nairy Baghramian
Handle (2020)
For her edition on the occasion of “Texte zur Kunst”’s 30th anniversary, Nairy Baghramian created a small, abstracted door handle cast in aluminum and laid in a warmish blue wax bed. Without its requisite hardware, the handle is rendered useless and indistinct, although, set perfectly into the wax, it doesn’t appear to be in-tended for real use anyway. Rather, the grabbing and turning of the handle’s form, molded and re-molded by innumerable hands, has been paused for a moment, similar to earlier works by Baghramian such as “Maintai-ners” or “Formage de Tête,” to intensify the view of the infrastructural object in relation to spatial economies and hierarchies. As if time had stopped in this nestled sculpture, the relationship between sign and signified, between object and its meaning, is dissolved.