by Eve Rogers // Dec. 12, 2025
As I stand in the bright white foyer of carlier | gebauer, the archway to the gallery looms ahead like a yawning mouth. Crossing into Pakui Hardware’s ‘Thresholds,’ I step onto what might be the factory floor of a futuristic mad-mechanic’s workshop or the boiler room in the bowels of an alien spaceship adrift in some imagined cosmos. Mechanical arms extend and retract in steady and deliberate rhythms, periodically releasing bursts of pressurized air with a sudden head-turning pneumatic hiss.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
Four strange structures occupy the room, similar but different enough to perhaps be prototypes of an intriguing new invention. There is a sense of having entered a showroom as they each occupy their own corner of the space, positioned at a quarter-turn to each other, offering a comprehensive impression of these magnificent beasts from every angle. A hush falls over my inner monologue, reminiscent of the wonder of a TV studio audience following the reveal of a state-of-the-art sports car as it slowly rotates on a game show stage.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
In each instance, a stainless steel tripod supports a telescopic limb, at the end of which a blown-glass phallus is affixed, its form recalling the alien biomorphism of H.R. Giger. Held out like a fist, a shield or a probe of some sort and pushed forward with methodical persistence, testing the pliancy of a taut, skinlike textile stretched tight like a sail, it tentatively probes the membrane before retreating. There is a vague but hypnotic eroticism to the movement, uncertain and exploratory. Persistence and resistance exist in an uneasy but non-threatening equilibrium and the longer I spend amongst it, the high-pressure hiss begins to sound more like the exhale of a deep meditative breath.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
The title of the exhibition operates on multiple registers. These thresholds are at once literal and metaphorical: filters that define interior and exterior, self and other, friend and foreign body. Informed by biological logic, they echo the operations of skin, immune systems and organs that remember, recognize and resist intrusion. On closer inspection, the details reveal the extension of this metaphor into the political, where imagining the threshold as a barrier evokes borders and fences at which the decision to grant or deny access is often arbitrary and inhumane. I am struck by the discovery that the “sails” towering over me match the scale of real international border walls and fences, making palpable the insurmountable impenetrability of systems imposed on so-called illegal aliens. Suddenly, my initial perception of these sculptures as whimsical windsurfing robots seems foolish and regrettable against mental images of overcrowded migrant vessels.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
There is no shortage of significance to the materials used in the construction of these works. Stainless steel evokes surgical precision, technological advancement and impartial resistance; silicone recalls the intimacy and vulnerability of skin; organic forms of hand-blown glass capture warmth, referencing both bodily heat and the infrared surveillance technologies designed to detect it. These rigid forms glow orange within the membranes, pausing momentarily, cradled amniotic. Rejected time and again by an unknown impartial faceless intelligence, they relentlessly keep trying.
Every movement of an arm creates minute shifts in the atmosphere, with the lingering ripple through silicone and textile punctuating periodic moments of stillness. It occurs to me that the installation might have seemed more like a performance if it weren’t for the indifference of these machines to their human spectators—they operate according to their own logic, autonomous yet strangely attentive. I can’t help but begin to perceive them as participants and imagine the pushing sensation at the moment of contact: the subsequent expansion, contraction, adaptation and recovery. Drawn in by this cycle of yielding and holding firm, I sense a negotiation is underway. The works, in this sense, are not merely objects but processes—dynamic systems that register, interpret and respond to forces.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
In the next room, five large framed prints line the walls. A series of abstract photographic works developed to accompany the sculptures, they too explore and investigate the concept of the membrane through experimental means. Soft in focus and similarly flesh-like and uncanny in appearance, I wonder whether I’m looking at the underside of an arthropod or the impression of a spinal cord through the translucent skin of an alien’s back. Printed on aluminum, they are framed behind glass that’s been partially coated in a layer of silicone, producing the uneasy sense that the photograph’s unknown subject is resisting captivity and leaking from its own world into the gallery space. Less arresting than their kinetic predecessors, the photographs still raise questions surrounding borders, both corporeal and conceptual.
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds,’ 2025, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin // Courtesy of the artists and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, photo by Andrea Rossetti
In the end, it seems impossible not to consider the broader implications of how these biological metaphors of immunity, resistance and penetration are appropriated by political discourse to justify security measures, surveillance and the policing of borders. The show makes tangible what is often abstract: the paradoxical resilience and vulnerability of bodies, the hostility and ethical shortcomings of systems created under the guise of security and protection. Perhaps in a different time or place this display would elicit a radically different, more lighthearted response, but in this moment the gravity of its message is undeniably timely and acute.
Exhibition Info
carlier | gebauer
Pakui Hardware: ‘Thresholds’
Exhibition: Nov. 1-Dec. 20, 2025
carliergebauer.com
Markgrafenstraße 67, 10969 Berlin, click here for map
