Jan Vorisek at Arcadia Missa

Elbows marks Jan Vorisek’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Vorisek’s work explores collective resonance and questions the dynamics of popular and sub-cultures, often taking the form of site-specific interventions, large-scale installations, and assemblages of sculpture, video, text, found objects, and sound, extending his activities with experimental music.

The exhibition proposes a modular way of thinking about stability, one that does not repurpose materials so much as reassign meaning to forms typically understood as immutable. In doing so, Vorisek’s installation unveils a concealed collective understanding of the fiction of reality and distorted cultural memory.

Elbows revisits Vorisek’s series, i give back to the landscape, the vomits of experience(2023), consisting of ready-made moulds that are typically used to cast decorative “antique style” columns. This mass-produced product is marketed to private homeowners and developers as a cost-effective way to shift perceived values of their property through ornamentation rather than function.

Here, Vorisek’s structures introduce curved custom-made extensions, which are integrated with the existing systems. This deliberate break in production and disfiguration is articulated through the distinctive structural bends. The columns appear as yellowed plastic shells with exposed industrial frameworks and black fastening pins, suggesting an abject or parasitic low-tech futurism, disrupting the classical promise of support and elegance.

Vorisek reframes the column not as a fixed emblem of support, but as a form in the midst of adjusting itself, negotiating the pressures that shape it. The curves suggest a moment where rigidity gives way to flexibility, or a precarious architectural form bending beyond its limits. The columns that meander through the gallery space, with their bends and arches, inhabit an unstable symbolic terrain. Historically, columns could symbolically be understood to underscore power, order and permanence. The semiotics of aspiration, combined with the whimsical gesture of surrealistic bend, also serves as an emblem of exhaustion, the potential collapse of labour markets and structures of support.

The exhibition is extended through a series of light works housed in artist-made acrylic frames. Each work is comprised of four tiles with quarter-circle reliefs that together form a circular motif. A singular equation of positive and negative parts are rendered by their light.

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Jan Vorisek(b. 1987, Basel, CH) lives and works in Zürich, CH. Recent solo exhibitions include Together Alone, 4649, Tokyo, JP (2025); Edge, Hour, Substance, 13th Manor Art Prize of the Canton of Zurich, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Winterthur, CH (2023); Music for shipping containers, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2022); No Sun, Swiss Institute, New York, US (2021); Collapse Poem, Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, CH (2020); and Crisis Instrument, Observation Society presented by Bottom Space, Guangzhou, CN (2018).

Recent group exhibitions include Spring 25, CCA Berlin, Berlin, DE (2025); Nowhere II, Council+, Berlin, DE (2024); Crowd Control, High Art with Arcadia Missa, Arles, FR (2022); Techno, Museion, Bolzano, IT (2021); Blind Date, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH (2019); and Its Urgent, Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Luma Westbau, Zürich, CH (2019).

Vorisek recently unveiled his first public sculpture, Freiläufer (Drifter), Windmill, RAL 2004, 2024, at the former Güterbahnhof on Hohlstrasse in Zürich, commissioned by the Canton of Zürich. He was awarded the 13th Manor Art Prize of the Canton of Zürich in 2023.