SEE / SAW

SEE / SAW
KANE CALÌ & MADELEINE FENWICK
11 SEPTEMBER – 31 OCTOBER 2026
OPENING: 10 SEPTEMBER 2026 | 6-9 PM
AOA;87 BERLIN

BERLIN ART WEEK
AOA;87 X R GALLERY

SEE / SAW is a two-gallery, two-artist exhibition by AOA;87 contemporary (Berlin) and R Gallery (Malta), presented on the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2026. It brings together new works by Madeleine Fenwick (b. 1988, London; lives in Valletta) and Kane Calì (b. 1983, Malta) – two positions that arrive at the same insight from opposite directions: balance is not a state. It is a negotiation between two weights.

A seesaw only works with two. It knows no equilibrium worth having – only the living correction between rising and falling, between me and you, between here and across the sea. This is the condition SEE / SAW examines: how we position ourselves – with the body, with perception, with material – inside structures we have not chosen and cannot leave. Instability is assumed. What the exhibition negotiates is what criticism has rarely addressed: the practice of remaining upright.

Fenwick builds systems from brass, steel and neon – materials that do not conceal tension but embody it. Organised around conceptual pairs held in proximity without resolution – He said / She said, Desire / Peace – her works follow a cyclical logic in which desire generates rivalry, rivalry generates crisis, and crisis generates a provisional order that does not hold. The viewer, catching their own reflection in polished surfaces, is not an observer but another variable in the system.

Calì approaches the same condition through its mediated surface. Treating the frozen image – the press photograph, the iconic silhouette – as a small metaphysical untruth, he translates imagery of contemporary conflict into three-dimensional metal reliefs. In War Hole: Destabilising the Witness, the flatness of the digital image breaks against the materiality of the metal that resists it. Each work has exactly one angle of clarity. Those who move, lose it. Seeing becomes navigation, complicity, decision.

Both practices operate on the principle of opposing forces – not as simplification, but as a field of tension that takes form only through the resistance of its poles. Perception, here, is participation: a positioning, a shift of weight.

On the collaboration. SEE / SAW is itself built like its title: two galleries, two shores, one board. AOA;87 contemporary and R Gallery have grown, over years of shared projects between Berlin and Valletta, into something rarer than a partnership – a working friendship, grounded in mutual respect and the conviction that the most precise curatorial decisions are made in dialogue, not in isolation. This exhibition was conceived jointly from the first conversation to the final hang: one gallery’s weight answering the other’s. That the show examines balance as a relationship between two forces is no coincidence. It is a self-portrait.

All works were produced for this exhibition.