Miriam Kongstad: A Balancing Act

Kongstad’s paintings are made not only with brushes and saturated colours, but also through the use of industrial tools and physical manipulation. Angle grinders, polishing machines, engravings, blows, and pressure shape the aluminium surfaces through friction and collision. Aluminium’s contradictory nature - hard and cold, yet light, pliable, and vulnerable - mirrors the body’s own duality. The surfaces shift between smooth and rough, anti-slip and perforated textures, suggesting risk, stability, and safety. Their tactility becomes zones of potential movement: to slide, stop, sink, or support. This bodily tension continues in the sculpture: two steel pipes, held in offset balance, carry a delicate, milky-white mineral that references the microscopic crystals in the inner ear responsible for human balance. 

 

A fall challenges our desire for control and demands surrender to life’s circular movement. Yet Kongstad frames the fall not only as failure, but as an opening toward cultural, social, and bodily complexity. In free fall, the body is guided by vulnerability, instinct, and potential. When we fall from a pedestal, a relationship, or an identity, the conditions that led to the fall are revealed. Here, the possibility for transformation emerges. This reflects a contemporary moment in which beliefs collapse, world orders shift, and values waver. Still, the exhibition insists that vulnerability holds strength, change holds hope, and that the fall may be met by a helping hand; an invitation to imagination, awareness, and empathy. The fall is not only brutal and destructive, but also a terrain of tenderness, pathos, and honesty.