Dazwischen eine Welt

At first glance the works on view could hardly be more different. Irene Hardjanegara develops large-format drawings in ink on paper through a rigorous process that oscillates between meticulous rules and permitted unpredictability: between control and intuition, consciousness and the unconscious, perfection and chance. The result is minimalist compositions that develop a complex momentum of their own as they are made, from intimate formats to dimensions that demand, or far exceed, the reach of her body. In works such as Structure and Dynamics of Large Scale Cascading Failure, thousands of single lines condense into fields of colour and movement that feel at once geological and atmospheric: surfaces that breathe, shift and resist a final reading.

Hartmut Wirks approaches the built environment as a stage on which human life unfolds and withdraws again. In his photographs, architecture becomes a place where the functional gains unexpected meaning and the seemingly accidental points to basic conditions of human existence. A tree trunk piercing the roof of a modernist pavilion; a glass spear suspended in space; a ruined interior framing a coastal landscape like a painting. Wirks looks for the lasting within the transient and makes the tension between construction and decay, shelter and exposure the subject of close attention.

At Pi (π), Hardjanegara and Wirks join their ways of working in a shared installation and meet at the threshold of their two fields. With Walter Benjamin they understand this threshold not as a border but as a zone of transition; with Hannah Arendt as an in-between space in which human action and meaning become possible. Dazwischen eine Welt (A World In Between).