You could cut it with a knife
Hanni Kamaly, Melanie Kitti
April 11–May 18, 2025
Vernissage: Fri 11 April, 18.00–21.00

Please join us for the opening of our spring exhibition.

“You could cut it with a knife” is a common English idiom used to express tension so palpable you can slit it with a blade. As the world grapples with this very sensation, the exhibition takes it as its material, and presents artists who work at the precipice of discomfort. It plays with the raw friction of existence: strain, unease, the pull between worlds, forces working in opposition, the moment just before breaking point. Offering no assertive answers or solace, it instead explores the space in between and its potential.

Melanie Kitti presents fresco paintings depicting figures placed and trapped within frames. Limbs twisted into shapes, soft colours bleeding into each other. Some of the figures are human-ish, some animal-ish. This claustrophobic feeling extends from the artist’s refusal to be placed in a square. Kitti is interested in form and formlessness, the meeting point between language and painting, and the aftermath of the clash. 

Hanni Kamaly’s practice unearths narratives of subject making through sculpture, film and performance. Kamaly cuts into racial and colonial history to emphasise moments of dehumanisation and the construction of the Other. In this context the artist’s rigorous research manifests through video and their signature steel sculptures suspended in motion, balancing on needle-like legs and anchored on the gallery’s floor. Each sculpture is named to memorialise and to never forget.  

You could cut it with a knife is a meditation on resistance and release, a fragile balance held together by forces that threaten to tear it apart.

Curator: Tawanda Appiah