Everything shifts. Everything is being shifted. Alongside larger geosocial and geopolitical translocations of peoples and matter come daily shifts that remain unnoticed, yet often become agents of critical transformation, openness and new beginnings. By exploring these smaller movements of matter, form and meaning, Critical Shifts offers two techniques of following subtle alternations, impalpable variations, and illusive temporalities of constant change – (1) extraction and (2) bias.

The exhibition showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace shifts – whether through material, metaphorical or invisible form– as a method of their diverse practices and consider extraction and bias as internal to any knowledge production. A postcard is being sent from the Canary Islands to Germany, content disappears from servers of Internet portals, a photocopying machine in the office extracts copies of unnecessary documents, sand is running through. We are surrounded by the spontaneous and the unknown. We navigate if by shifts.

Curated by Margarita Osepyan, Maria Korolkova and Kate Umnova