You Left This / Geh Nicht
Solo Exhibition at Backhaus Projects (Berlin, Germany), April 2025
“In a city of residual surfaces and transient architectures, Aubrey Theobald’s latest exhibition at Backhaus Projects, You Left This / Geh Nicht, probes the porous boundaries of domesticity, surveillance, and habituation. Through a rigorously process-driven practice spanning sculpture, video, and installation, Theobald constructs an affective space where the familiar—home, caretaking, the body—becomes entangled in the uneasy mechanics of longing and exclusion within the built environment.”
This exhibition utilizes a fostered relationship with my neighborhood pigeons (and the surfaces that they intervene with) as a means to project a precarious emotional state, grounded by ritual and produced through hardscape material sculpture, found object manipulation, sound, and a still collaged image.
The work began surveilling a developing, ongoing relationship with the two pigeons that rest outside my living room window and progressed in the months following, reaching a body of work coping within the boundaried tension point between hostility and protection, domestic and architectural protection, longing and reservation.
