Ordinary things are at the core of the works of Irmela Gertsen and Nancy Jahns. Both treat them in different ways. Subtle dialogues between things emerge.

Jahns is interested in traces. Objects found by chance in her surroundings might, on closer inspection, tell stories about themselves stripped down to their essence by a long time of usage. And it may well turn out that their essence is quite different from the purpose they have been made for. By manifold means – photography, division, combination, reconstruction – Jahns discovers unknown sides of seemingly well-known things. By their new perception, often beautiful, sometimes strange and even disturbing, she creates her own universe of things different in worth and purpose from everyday life.
Gertsen releases things of daily use completely from the burden of their functional shape. Probing and exploiting their material features she builds and constructs artifical objects and ensembles of  playful and, therefore, orderly freedom and most surprising lightness. Gertsen’s extraordinary ordinary things, somehow, seem to reflect in their own way the old idea of kosmos meaning “beautiful order”. Neither heaviness nor stagnation is known in this universe of things just soft movement at each moment endangering the fragility of its unique architecture.