Less than 70 kilometres from the exhibition space is a landscape in which there sit a few very particularly shaped building blocks of red sandstone that arrived there a hundred years ago. They have entered the space in the language of modern logistics – the kind of containers you would expect most of the products that travel this world currently are housed in. It’s a language so familiar and basic, it’s almost dull: The surface of brown, recycled material, the wavy layers of paper sandwiched in between, curvy edges, dented corners, coloured straps, labels written for devices or a professional knowledge. It is its ubiquity which makes it a language. We know what to expect and what diverts from expectation – the building blocks require an odd grammar.

Nicola Arthen is an artist based in Amsterdam and London. His practice is an investigation into the mutual relations between objects’ and humans’ capacities, a negotiation between site and experience. By isolating artefacts from their peripheral state and turning them into protagonists, he is invested in their stories, struggles and unique qualities, as well as the poetics and politics of labour to reproduce these. He focuses on unexpected encounters in systems of standardisation – the trace of an individual’s hand or personal considerations in a serial product: a makeshift, cobbled up water meter, a smooth assembly line choreography to cope with the machines’ rhythms, a hesitation in a computer-generated voice. His work takes the form of installations and time-based mediums, often contributing to a moderated spatial environment.