The Ground Giving Way Beneath Our Feet: Michael Sailstorfer’s Pull the Rug at Galerie Judin

A standout highlight of the Berlin Art Week 2026 programme, Galerie Judin hosts Pull the Rug, Michael Sailstorfer’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Addressing what feels like the defining anxiety of our era—the steady erosion of certainty, continuity, and safety—Sailstorfer does not merely depict this uncanny state; he translates it into a visceral, spatial encounter that visitors literally walk across.

Expanding the parameters of conventional sculpture through temporal dimensions of sound, kinetic action, scent, and gradual dissolution, Sailstorfer choreographs a striking intervention in the gallery’s entrance room. At measured intervals, an attendant appears, wrenches a paving stone from the flooring, and drops it through a slender aperture in the wall. Inside an adjoining chamber completely barred from view, a bespoke apparatus hurls the stone at high velocity against the wall.

The percussive roar resounding throughout the room, the fine film of dust gathering across the gallery, and the faint tremor felt underfoot become the physical residues of a hidden wreckage. With the mechanism itself kept strictly out of sight, the audience is left alone with the collateral fallout of an unseen force. As the ground steadily deprives viewers of its footing, Sailstorfer delivers an unsparing reminder: stability is nothing more than a passing illusion.

This spatial unraveling, taking shape incrementally across the run of the exhibition, will be archived in a dedicated documentary publication produced for the finissage.