POST Nijmegen
Simone Albers
EXTENDED!
Title: The Middle Realm
Artist: Simone Albers
Curator: Fenne Saedt
Date: 31.05.2025 – 07.12. 2025
Location: Nijmegen
What stories are hidden in the earth's soil and how can art capture them?
In The Middle Realm, artist Simone Albers focuses on the earth as a living system in which traces of the past are stored. To this end, she examines archaeological, geological and palaeontological collections as bearers of this history.
The title of the exhibition refers to a space between traditional categories. This in-between space consists of objects and phenomena that move between what we would usually label as natural, historical or cultural. They take mixed forms, are composite or changeable and therefore cannot be unequivocally categorised. Albers' work also moves between categories: between organic and inorganic, between sculpture and painting. They invite you to break free from a frame of mind in which the primary focus is on humans. Thus, Albers' paintings are not only windows to palaeolandscapes, but also carriers of borrowed collections: from a molar of a woolly rhino to a fossilised sea lily.
The Middle Realm marries newly developed artworks with objects from collections of natural and cultural history museum De Bastei and amateur scientists. By juxtaposing these diverse objects, the boundaries between artwork, artefact and natural object are blurred in the exhibition, removing hierarchies between the objects presented. Thus, the exhibition shows how both artworks and soil finds are not isolated but relational.