Bat-Ami Rivlin creates arresting, paradoxical sculptures that disrupt and reorientate our relationship to everyday objects. Working with site-specific economies her improvised, informal assemblages – comprising a range of consumer goods, domestic and industrial products; the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary material culture – call to attention the ontological surplus of discrete objects, their latent affect and often-charged codification when connected to, through and with the human body. Through formal annexing, displacement and proposition, Rivlin’s subversive – and at times, whimsical – ecology of objects is populated with foreign entities bound only to themselves, alluding to broader systems of codependency, exchange, control, crisis and survival, oscillating between contrasting sensations of imprévu and déjà vu – between the unexpected and the strangely familiar.

Untitled (inflatable slider) is an exhibition in two-parts, marking Rivlin’s first solo presentation with Lo Brutto Stahl and the inauguration of Brutto Stahl’s new permanent exhibition space in Air Service Basel, Basel’s private airport. Split between Lo Brutto Stahl’s primary gallery in Paris and its satellite Basel space, the exhibition continues Rivlin’s modus operandi of working with locally-informed surplus objects to produce poetic sculptural installations that both invite and obscure metaphorical analysis. The execution of the exhibition is defined and articulated through a single ‘protocol’ – a score of parameters and instructions enacted onto a particular object that vicariously determines its topology and character in any given space: in this case, each site hosting the unravelling architectural concertina of a monumental 14m pressurised evacuation slide salvaged from an Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft and the only full-length double-deck jet airliner; a model later withdrawn from production in the wake of the global pandemic.

Unfurling through a voluptua of systematic, instructional folds or strewn flat across the open space of the gallery, Untitled (inflatable slider) as a protocol includes the elemental object of a locally-sourced surplus inflatable Airbus A380 slider, coupled with inalienable directives such as ‘cut through 10 LB straps located through the slider to release and unroll’, and ‘if the slider comes in contact with a corner, create 2 folds that mimic the corner’s angle.’ It is a system of enactment that confounds principles of artwork, articulation, creating an ever-unfolding syntax of the given that not only does determines the two instances of this exhibition, but any and all future presentations of the work: the particular jurisdictions of future locations in which Untitled (inflatable slider) may be shown affecting the availability of model of evacuation slide, its material and formal capacities, its latent affectual qualities.

Untethered from their prescribed function and rearticulated as autonomous, incommensurable objects that perform a new language, Rivlin’s objects reveal not only the systems of categorisation, production and utility that overcode our material world, but the ultra-contemporary network these highly-designed objects exist within: subject to vociferous regulation and testing by the aviation industry, empowered by global tourism and trade, made possible by fibre-reinforced plastics and heat-reflective paint, aerospace technology, business compliance, pressurised gas and inflation chambers, modelled on the human BMI index, gravity and velocity, computer simulation and corporate risk analysis – baiting associated metaphors of late-capitalist crisis and the failure of modern care mechanisms. However, for Rivlin it is the inherent performativity, the internal logic and reconfigured nature of the object itself which sublimates – whilst not eliminating – these networked allusions into the immanent qualities of the slides themselves; establishing a fragmented yet alluring call and response between object, architecture and body.

It is no coincidence we see no trace of the artist’s hand in either installation. Sourced from a French aircraft ‘boneyard’, a storage site for planes retired from service, Rivlin’s choice of object is on the one hand immediate and literal – unapologetically so. It demands from us an instinctive recognition of the object’s utility or genesis at the very moment of its cessation and futility, compelling us to acknowledge the echo of a song that lingers long after the last note has faded. We are drawn to the near-libidinal quality of each slide’s cosmetic silver skin; the industrial embryo of its erupted steel container; its careworn, slackened body; its failure to support our weight, size and mass; its intensities of speed, ascension, paroxysm and collapse, all of which take on emergent affects and meanings within the specific architectural details of each space.

In every case, Rivlin’s Untitled (inflatable slider) as an artwork protocol produces a singular sculptural assemblage, but composed of parts and enunciations that stubbornly reclaim their own place. Imbibed with formal intuition, harmony and abruptness, Rivlin’s work reflects what Maggie Nelson would describe as ‘the music of thinking’,[1] the contested yet melodic blank space of what lies in-between – one that Rivlin uses to address an existentialism of sculpture in the present: both the terror that emerges from the universal equivalence and exchangeability of all objects and materials, and the freedom that emerges from objects that are nevertheless constantly exerting agency onto the world around them.

[1] Maggie Nelson, On Freedom (London: Johnathan Cape, 2021).