Artists

Nida Sinnokrot

Press release

carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Above Ground Below, a solo exhibition by Palestinian conceptual artist Nida Sinnokrot, opening on Friday 1 May, 6 – 9 pm, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Rubber-Coated Rocks, initiated in 2001, is presented here in a 2024–26 iteration. Composed of stones, discarded footballs, and other found materials gathered near checkpoints in Palestine, each sculpture binds together elements marked by circulation, impact, and abandonment. The forms recall heads or assemblies of bodies—worn, weathered, and held in tension and suspension — suggesting both vulnerability and persistence. Bound and stabilised, they stand as accumulations of contact: between surface and force, object and memory, play and violence. In this 2024–26 presentation, the works are elevated on industrial steel pipes and limestone blocks, extending their material language into a vertical register, linking ground, infrastructure, and display, forming constellatory groupings that oscillate between the bodily and the architectural. Water Witness extends this inquiry into infrastructure, shifting from the projectile to the conduit. These sculptures assemble ceramic vessels, steel pipes, irrigation valves, and custom-cast fittings into upright configurations that evoke systems of flow, storage, and control. Drawing on vernacular water practices and the sacred Palestinian geographies documented by Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, particularly his accounts of springs, wells, and cisterns as sites of belief, ritual, and guardianship, the works situate infrastructure within a broader cosmological framework. Canaan's writings on amulets and protective devices inform the logic of assembly: materials are combined, bound, and suspended for their capacity to mediate vulnerability and care, producing forms that are at once infrastructural and symbolic. Presented together, these bodies of work trace a shift from impact to flow, from the immediacy of collision to the extended temporalities of infrastructure. Both operate through assemblage, binding disparate materials into upright figures that hold and release tension. Each sculpture functions as a structuring presence that makes visible the systems—material, ecological, and political—in which it is embedded, and the aesthetic forms through which protection is imagined and enacted. Taken as a whole, the installation operates as a field of constellations, objects held in relation, forming a cosmology grounded in material practice and resistance.