01/11/2025
Kuu Maa, a group exhibition opens .nyc from November 21, 2025, through January 3, 2026. The exhibition includes work by
Press release
Margot Samel is pleased to announce Kuu Maa, a group exhibition with Sasha Brodsky, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Miho Dohi, Edith Karlson, Cécile Lempert, Man Yau, and Klara Zetterholm.
Taking its name from an Estonian song by Vana, Kuu Maa brings together seven artists whose works engage with distance, not simply as a measurement of space but as an affective condition between people, places, and things. Kuu and Maa, moon and earth, became a way to think about what lies between us: the quiet gravity that holds things apart and still keeps them turning.
The exhibition moves through sculpture, textile, and painting. Forms hover, materials fold back on themselves, gestures blur into repetition. What remains is a sense of suspension, of closeness that never quite resolves. Rather than following a linear narrative, Kuu Maa moves associatively, assembling partial stories, overlooked gestures, and emotional residues. These fragments do not seek completion. Instead, they invite a kind of attunement, a sensitivity to what cannot be fully named or known. In this way, the exhibition becomes a space of heterotopic resonance, echoing Michel Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia: a place of multiplicity and contradiction, where meaning is constantly shifting and refracted.
The title does not point to a distant planet or a fictional landscape but to a metaphorical terrain, an interior or interrelational space shaped by silence, proximity, and uncertainty. It is a place where gestures remain suspended, where memory and material fold into one another, and where connection is felt as both presence and absence. Within this space, the works do not speak in unison but in proximity, each offering a distinct, fleeting expression of what it means to be close and apart at once.
Kuu Maa is organized with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Consulate General of Finland in New York, the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Finlandia Foundation National, and the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland.
