Although it doesn’t exist, the word “continuouslessness” conjures a familiar, unnerving feeling of potential and dissolution. Its inventor, the British born, Berlin-based artist Kasia Fudakowski, employs it here to great effect as the title and prevailing sentiment of an exhibition that combines social and political observation with distinctive comedic flair. 

For years, Fudakowski has worked on a series of room partitions that explore the contingency of the form: To stand, each divider must be joined to another one. For this show, she created a Boîte-en-valise-style “travel edition,” comprised of miniature versions of the forty-three panels she has realized thus far. Joined by magnets and displayed in a snaking configuration on a table, they draw inspiration from improvisatorial principles like bricolage and tinkering. The earliest among them, from 2017, resemble gates, and as the series wends its way into the present, we follow the artist’s evolving frame of mind and references: the Eurozone, the Church, immigration, sex. The Date, 2019—one of three pieces also installed here in full-scale—is particularly prescient in its anticipation of pandemic-era alienation and awkwardness. Here, Fudakowsi stages an imaginary first encounter between potential romantic partners. A plexiglass divider bifurcates an oval tabletop inlaid with fingernail clippings and a tooth: a visual plea to air your dirty laundry before you waste her time.

At a juncture when human connection is as necessary as it is stymied, and new relationships must be formed to mend a divided society, Fudakowski pierces the illusion of separation by forging (or rather, magnetizing) new links. “Continuouslessness” avoids neither the complexity of these tasks nor the contemporary feeling of chronic dread. It offers a poetic superstructure to imagine how everyday experience might, in some small way, set the scene for how things play out on larger stages.

— Isabel Parkes