ALICJA KWADE: COSMIC DRIFT BETWEEN STEEL AND TIME

Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice, Poland) constructs environments that trouble the certainties of space, time, and material perception. Based in Berlin, Kwade works across sculpture, installation, and conceptual design, grounding her visual vocabulary in philosophical and scientific inquiry. Her work has been exhibited widely at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019); and the Venice Biennale (2017). In 2022, she participated in Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia, and her current solo exhibition Telos Tales is on view at Pace Gallery, New York, through 15 June 2025.

Kwade’s practice addresses elemental questions of what is ‘real,’ inviting viewers to encounter time not as a linear concept but as a spatial and perceptual event. With a deep engagement in material experimentation and metaphysical thought, Kwade’s artworks emerge as propositions—at once tactile and speculative.

Blurred Realities and Displaced Selves

In her 2022 work In Blur, Kwade situates her conceptual inquiries within the shifting physicality of the desert landscape. Originally commissioned for Desert X AlUla, this large-scale installation is composed of powder-coated writing steel, mirrors, stones, and assorted found objects.

The structure resembles a fragmented script or a disrupted frequency—steel arcs gesture toward legibility while reflecting back the surrounding topography. Mirrors embedded in the frame catch shards of the desert and sky, blurring boundaries between site and subject. In this setting, the viewer becomes part of the sculpture’s logic: a shifting presence mirrored, scattered, and temporarily held.

Rather than asserting mastery over landscape, In Blur responds to it. The work reflects the entanglement between natural environment and human subjectivity, inviting viewers to consider how identity is shaped by space and context. The desert, often framed as timeless or infinite, is rendered here as a surface of interruption, where perception falters and the self is refracted.

Telos and Teleology

Kwade’s current solo exhibition Telos Tales at Pace Gallery, New York (on view May 7 to August 15, 2025), extends her longstanding exploration of time and causality into a monumental, immersive installation. Taking its title from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose, the exhibition proposes a spatial study of cause, motion, and existential orientation.

The central installation stages a constellation of sculptural elements: orbs of patinated bronze, pendulum-like forms, and a suspended multi-faced clock embedded within a framework of polished and powder-coated steel. A sound installation pulses throughout the gallery, heightening a sense of suspended temporality.

Here, time does not tick; it coils. As Kwade notes, the work “questions what our position is in the structure of this universe that we’re thrown into.”¹ The installation reflects on Aristotle’s theory of teleology—every object exists for a purpose—and places this classical notion under sensory and sculptural tension. In an environment split between the natural and the industrial, time emerges not as an absolute but as a conditioned phenomenon: flowing, delayed, layered.

Rendering Time Visible: PhaseChase

Also featured in Telos Tales is PhaseChase, a sculpture that deepens Kwade’s formal inquiry into time’s elasticity. A double-sided clock protrudes from a suspended ring of polished steel tubing, creating a ripple-like visual distortion that appears to echo time itself in motion.

What distinguishes PhaseChase is its ability to render a fundamentally abstract concept as a sculptural experience. Time, in Kwade’s hands, becomes optical and spatial. The reflective steel doesn’t just distort form—it collapses distinctions between image and structure, between what is seen and what is understood. As one moves around the piece, the sensation is less of watching a clock than being enfolded within its pulse.

Such works do not depict time so much as enact it. Kwade creates environments in which time is sensed through movement, comparison, and disorientation. As critic Erin Ikeuchi observed: “Rather than trying to pin time down, Kwade lets it slip, stretch and refract. With a deft, experimental hand her work refuses answers, finding beauty in the mystery and deconstructing it entirely.”

Through these perceptual mechanisms, Kwade visualises the immaterial. She offers not literal explanations but models for engaging with phenomena too vast, or too subtle, to contain. The viewer must reconstitute meaning through experience—each step a minor recalibration of perception.

Alicja Kwade’s practice invites us to inhabit systems that oscillate between the tangible and the speculative. Her sculptural environments do not assert fixed meaning but construct fields of relational potential—where time is dispersed, mirrored, and warped, and where perception becomes a form of inquiry in itself. In works like In Blur, Telos Tales, and PhaseChase, time is not simply represented; it is materialised, made spatial, stretched into phenomena that unfold between viewer and object.

These installations do not offer closure but open up cosmological drift—movement without arrival, logic without centre. Between polished steel and mirrored form, Kwade charts a terrain where matter shimmers with uncertainty, and reality itself appears as a structure still in motion.

Images: ©Alicja Kwade, Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu