Sabine Mirlesse — Instruments, Stockholm
In Stockholm, Sabine Mirlesse presents an exhibition at the Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, centered around an in situ installation in the Baltic Sea. There she subverts the notion of instrument by bringing into view functional objects that, once elevated, probe our own gestures of measurement—our appetite for capturing, classifying, and understanding the world.
Determined and determining, the processes she reveals contribute to making her work a kind of archaeology of knowledge attempts: a reflection on the cognitive—and even rational—boundaries of understanding. She focuses not on the objects of knowledge themselves, but on the process of their construction and the epistemological foundations that support them. For to think, observe, and measure the world is first and foremost a matter of relationship—a positioning in front of reality. Function, meaning, rationale, and shortcuts are all facets of a subtle desire to frame the shifting spectacle of the invisible.
If, for Gaston Bachelard, “a measuring instrument is not suited to passive observation; it is built to produce specific effects. It answers precise questions,” Sabine Mirlesse, in her sculptural practice, broadens the problematic: the instrument becomes a vector that formulates its own questions and carries within its very material the beginnings of answers.
Through a monumental sculptural installation that intertwines navigation tools with talismans unearthed from the tombs of Nordic women known as “seers,” Ode to Measurement, at sea level, a confrontation between form and function. Its fixity refers both to the desire for knowledge and to the testimony of nature’s action on our constructions. It is a gesture applied to the living, which will in turn inscribe its own traces—nature will act upon it.
In Mirlesse’s sculptures, this dream of knowing materializes—both in its simplicity and in its contradictions. The forms appear to have been torn from a world prior to function, or perhaps imported from a universe that has already exhausted it. Their power lies not in what they do, but in what they provoke.
In this sense, Ode to Measurement is not a work that sanctifies a bygone past, but a monument that listens. Immersed in water, exposed to the tides, it records variation even as it allows itself to be altered by it. Majestically situated in a natural environment, it breaks away from domestication to become truly exposed. Measurement no longer belongs to the wisdom of the master—it becomes the witness we must measure ourselves against in order, like a student, to find our place.
The series of works exhibited in parallel at the gallery reinforces this logic of reversal: decontextualized and rendered inoperative by the act of exhibition, these “instruments” become motifs. They open the way to another kind of inquiry: the raw materials from which they are made bear the potential charge of any spirituality that might claim them. No longer tools, but vectors of questioning, their center of gravity shifts. The instrument no longer points to its object—it makes it resonate, extending its echo.
In this way, without leveling systems of knowledge, Sabine Mirlesse composes visual tableaux as acts of thought—proposals for engaging with the world. Their ambiguities — very real — become pathways and channels of communication between rational, emotional, and spiritual approaches. All converge and transform into the plastic forms of a shared horizon which, without blending perspectives, connects them all to that which exceeds us.
Sabine Mirlesse, Instruments, Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, Linnégatan 31, 114 47 Stockholm, Sweden, from May 3rd to June 28th, 2025.
