Maxine Weiss’s installation “Nachwärme” builds on her artist residency in Taipei last year. Influenced by heated streets, fragmented family stories, fishermen waiting by the river, climbing plants, tiled buildings, multi-limbed animals, and the sticky sweetness of bubble tea. In the lingering warmth of these encounters, works from recent years coalesce into a scene wherein bodies shift, places merge into objects, and memories lose their reliability.
Their bodies are shaped from plant seeds into dense, hybrid forms that bear equally human, animal, and insect-like traits. Suspended between movement and stillness, they appear to exist in a state of limbo, waiting in a detached and tranquil calm.
Familiar objects appear here as relics, traces, or vessels of memory, shifting in their materiality and temporality. Aluminum and bronze casts of sea sponges and shell-like forms pierce through the asphalt, bringing the sea into the scene. A drinking cup made of tapioca pearls mutates into an archaeological relic, while sandals studded with staples appear simultaneously as everyday slippers and fragments of armor. Keys hang from a fishing rod, and no one knows anymore which doors they open.
In “Nachwärme,” a dreamlike structure unfolds in which memories, materials, and experiences overlap. Different places, times, and impressions condense into a self-contained space that emerges equally from personal memories and the continuous influences of a globally interconnected life.
