Exhibition Details

Galleria Continua / Les Moulins and Leo Orta are pleased to present When Walls Become Doors, a two part group exhibition across their respective venues, bringing together works by Leila Alaoui, Leandro Erlich, Osvaldo González, Subodh Gupta, Jorge Macchi, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Giovanni Ozzola, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Sislej Xhafa and Nari Ward at Galleria Continua and works by Bianca Bondi, Andrea Branzi, Maty Biayenda, Loucia Carlier, Paul Créange, Serban Ionescu, Marc Leschelier, Lucy Orta, Bob Smith and Zyva studio at Studio Orta.
The exhibition takes the mock-up as its point of departure, not as a reduction of reality, but as anticipation. These objects do not show what will be; they make visible what could be otherwise. Speculative houses, inverted interiors, porous spaces, unstable shelters and impossible architectures coexist within a journey that invites us to conceive form as a passage rather than a certainty. Walls cease to be limits and become thresholds.
When Walls Become Doors brings together proposals that question what it means to inhabit, physically, politically and emotionally, and explores points of convergence between architecture, sculpture and fiction through objects that open onto new ways of being in the world.
Leila Alaoui's photographs address migration through cracked surfaces and arid terrains, giving form to the personal histories of women and men who have crossed the sub-Saharan desert. The marks on the earth echo those carried on the body, visible or invisible.
Osvaldo González: Transparent adhesive tape, plexiglass and LEDs construct an architectural and spiritual space reminiscent of a temple or cathedral stained glass. González’s work explores the emotional experience of space, including silence, solitude and contemplation conveyed through the simplest materials.
Subodh Gupta: A mountain of stainless steel utensils, found in 80 per cent of Indian households, rises into the space, shimmering and monumental. The familiar becomes sacred. Everyday objects, charged with spirituality, transform the domestic into the luminous.
In Jorge Macchi's work, a vertical zipper becomes a fissure in space, a threshold to an invisible world. The work evokes the precise moment when the viewer accepts crossing the boundary between reality and fiction, often called the suspension of disbelief and opens onto the possibility of other realities.
Ornaghi & Prestinari present four heterogeneous materials—palissandro santos, alabaster, ceramic and fabric—which coexist within a sculpture that inhabits a liminal territory. Each element carries a different temporality and their tension produces not harmony, but a productive and unresolved balance.
Giovanni Ozzola presents a photographic series that explores the relationship between light, horizon and the inner drive that pushes human beings toward the edge, a perceptual zone where gaze, body and space enter suspension. Here, light does not illuminate; it attracts.
Pascale Marthine Tayou's immersive installation is composed of eleven multimedia panels, forming a pavilion-like structure, combining photographs, natural and artificial materials and objects collected between Cameroon and the Western world. The work questions the very notion of home, as family, as place or simply as a space where one feels a sense of belonging.
Nari Ward: Doors fitted with pockets filled with down, a material typically used to protect the body from the cold, become borderless portals, spaces of anticipation and hope where fragility and independence coexist in a single gesture.
Sislej Xhafa presents a bourgeois table with a reflective surface that holds a series of plates decorated with a keffiyeh motif, subtly introducing a historical and political resonance into a domestic interior, a tension the artist describes as a 'quiet duplicity'.