Shelf life at Nectar

A shelf, carefully planned, stocked, and arranged, can be many things at once: a lifestyle object, practical storage, or an archive. In the exhibition Shelf life, this everyday piece of furniture becomes both a curatorial tool and a metaphor for collecting, depositing and remembering. The shelves serve not only as display surfaces but as active structures that frame order, subvert classical systems of classification, embed stories, and make value ascriptions visible while allowing new connections to emerge.

Across multiple levels, Shelf life presents works in various media by more than 30 artists, inviting visitors to reflect on consumption, temporality, and the cultural value of objects: What happens to things, ideas or art as they age? Which narratives prevail over the course of their existence – and which fall into obscurity?

The exhibition also explores the lifespan of artifacts, both material and immaterial, as well as the cycles of production, perception and archiving. Issues such as visibility, accessibility, and transience come to the fore. In the compressed arrangement of the works, a concentrated space for thought unfolds, in which the stories of objects and the boundaries between use and display become perceptible.