A Single Hurt Color: Alberto Giacometti, Göksu Kunak, Kolja Kärtner Sainz, Dean Sameshima, Marianna Uutinen, Ming Yuan

A Single Hurt Color takes its name from “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,” the opening prose poem of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons from 1914. In that book, objects speak. Cups, boxes, curtains, and carafes take on agency. They do not only signify, they act. Stein collapses sense and sensation until color becomes bruise, a container becomes a voice, and description becomes an ethics of relation. Her experiment was rooted in looking, especially at Cézanne, whose portraits of his wife taught her that the world could be shattered and reassembled as facets and that perception itself could be the subject. Stein’s prose strains toward cubism, and its planes and repetitions anticipate abstraction. A generation later, Alberto Giacometti copied Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne, then spent a lifetime modeling human presence as if distance were the true medium. His attenuated figures are all edge and aura, near and far at once. The line that closes Stein’s opening poem, “the difference is spreading,” offers a second key. It names a felt interval in which identity, relation, and form begin to change.

This exhibition reads that interval through the work of Göksu Kunak and through Berlin as a site where difference is lived in the body. Here the single hurt color becomes the singular experience of being Turkish in Berlin and the singular experience of life within and after the guest worker system. It also names the difference of being queer in a largely heteronormative public sphere. Pain is not treated as spectacle. It is understood as history registering in pigment and surface, as marginality and gender pressing on form in profound ways. Stein’s poem can be read as a coded love poem to Alice B Toklas and as a declaration of difference in modernist writing and looking. In that spirit Kunak expands what an artwork can be. Film, drawing, performance, research, and 3D printing gather into one living composition.

Göksu Kunak’s Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite takes its title from Tunç Başaran’s film from 1989 and from Feride Çiçekoğlu’s novella from 1986 about Barış, a boy growing up inside a women’s prison. For Kunak, who is nonbinary, this story becomes a many layered metaphor for migrant realities, self determination, and resistance to social and political limits. Their practice moves between art, history, and social policy. In this installation, two 3D printed busts are suspended before a wall that carries projected video and drawn motifs. The gestures derive from photographs in the DOMiD archive that document Turkish workers in the 1960s undergoing humiliating medical examinations in Istanbul. Those procedures were meant to judge fitness for labor and so determined the chance for a new life in Germany. The quoted gestures hold the emotional and physical memory of that passage. A white embroidered curtain, familiar from domestic interiors in Turkey, veils an architectural opening and turns visibility into a charged threshold. It speaks to the tension between exposure and shelter, between remembrance and suppression. The curtain becomes a metaphor for social separation and estrangement, which are central themes in Başaran’s story and in many migrant lives.

Dean Sameshima’s being alone anchors a second reading of Stein’s carafe. Twenty five black and white photographs picture anonymous viewers bathed in the glow of blank cinema screens. No faces are shown. No on screen images appear. The architecture that protects desire is what remains. Negative space becomes an active force. Earlier series mapped apertures of queer space. Here, the emptied screen speaks. Absence becomes a medium of relation. The images describe a form of common solitude and propose that desire can be strongest in what is withheld.

Kolja Kärtner Sainz paints as if membranes and engines were learning each other’s grammar. The Hypernode paintings stage meetings between the embryonic and the metallic, the cellular and the galactic. Ribs and beams, membranes and alloys, flicker in and out of legibility and mutate across canvases like a system evolving new organs. Timothy Morton’s reminder that we are always inside an object is useful here. These works act like cross sections of an ecology that lets bodies happen. They refuse a single vantage and invite the viewer to sense scale through attention rather than through outline.

Ming Yuan’s ALIBI turns framing into portraiture. Replicated Van Cleef and Arpels boxes, velvet lined and carefully lit, replace the jewel as the protagonist. What remains when ornament is removed. Following Marcel Mauss, gifts bind souls through objects. Following Bronisław Malinowski, some gifts clinch social contracts. Ming Yuan’s boxes are both. They are vessels dense with expectation. In stripping away the gem, she refuses a history in which Asiatic femininity has been staged as portable ornament. The vacancy points to replica economies and to the theater of quiet luxury. It shows how class performance scripts desire and how identity is framed by surfaces that frame other surfaces.

Marianna Uutinen pushes painting until it enters the room. Creased strips of acrylic become chromatic reliefs that oscillate between glamour and grit. Golds, primaries, anilines, and black draw the eye, yet the pleasure is architectural. These are not pictures of allure. They produce allure as a function of material fact. Gesture becomes object and the surface begins to think.

Across the exhibition, containers and thresholds recur. There are carafes and screens, curtains and boxes. There are rooms that enclose a practice and practices that enclose a room. Sameshima frames an empty image to reveal its social surround. Kunak’s veil condenses geopolitics into a domestic textile and turns history into palpable air. Kärtner Sainz’s canvases behave like membranes between incompatible scales. Ming Yuan’s cases reveal how framing frames us. Uutinen’s acrylic skins convert the picture plane into a meeting place. If there is a common ethic here, it lives in the interval where seeing thickens into feeling and where subjects risk becoming objects that look back.

Stein studied Cézanne to learn how to look. Giacometti studied Cézanne to learn how to keep looking when likeness fails. A Single Hurt Color carries their lesson forward. It proposes that color can be an event and that form can be a relation. It suggests that the most precise art can be the most withholding. The aim is not exclusion. The aim is to let meaning accumulate in the space between. In that interval, which might be the ache of a carafe, the hush of a blank screen, or the quiet inside a jewel box, vision and touch converge. What we see is not only what is there. It is also what it feels like to be held, briefly and exactly, at the threshold.