hands make mistakes

Ariel Schlesinger’s work unfolds as a negotiation between material fact and improbable survival. Across sculptures, films, and engineered systems, he collaborates with materials—gas, fire, air, water—not as inert matter, but as agents whose own behaviors structure form, time, and risk. Objects in Schlesinger’s world are neither dead things nor metaphors; they are companions in a precarious architecture where life, collapse, endurance, and memory are inseparable. His practice stages not monumental gestures, but subtle deflections: improbable continuities that emerge where combustion flickers, pressure destabilizes, or infrastructure quietly gives way.

Rather than engineering stability, Schlesinger constructs provisional systems where matter acts with its own logic—fraying, sustaining, failing—without narrative closure. This material intelligence carries the ethical weight of an Arendtian world: one where human and nonhuman forces shape each other, where history materializes not as record but as rupture, displacement, and fragile construction. Violence in Schlesinger’s work does not erupt as spectacle; it circulates atmospherically, engineered into ordinary objects, slow infrastructures, and unseen thresholds, echoing the conditions that TJ Demos has mapped across ecological and political terrains.

At the same time, Schlesinger’s interventions open speculative spaces akin to Ursula K. Le Guin’s terrains of uncertain survival, where life persists not through triumph but through improvisation, drift, and altered inhabitation. A branch burns into persistence; a bicycle releases flames without ceasing to move; a lighter, remade in wood, surrenders its flame into an aperture beyond sight. Schlesinger’s objects are not monuments to resistance—they are infrastructures of companionship with decay, invention, and uncertainty, call for staying with the trouble of entangled worlds.

In Schlesinger’s practice, time folds like matter, like a sort of residual power connected to the past, and the potential for a better future, even if that seems unattainable, is palpable in these small acts of continuation. For him, history is not redeemed but momentarily reconfigured through material play.

Combustion, collapse, memory, and circulation are not backdrops to his work; they are the operations through which survival itself is articulated as a practice without guarantees. Humor surfaces here—not as escape, but as the slight, deliberate dislocation that makes the impossible visible. Against a world seeking certainty, Ariel Schlesinger’s work proposes unstable alignments, partial continuities, and improbable architectures where the unseen energies of matter and history flicker into form.

Schlesinger’s oil lamp begins with a branch: organic, brittle, already touched by time. Following a method drawn from bronze casting—where the solid becomes hollow to survive the casting fire—Schlesinger reengineers the stick’s interior to carry oil, allowing a single flame to burn from its tip. If the branch carries echoes of natural fragility, it is fire that transforms it, not into ruin but into precarious persistence. In a world increasingly shaped by combustive events—wildfires across continents, infrastructures melting under heat, survival itself destabilized—the agency of fire demands a new understanding.

Schlesinger’s work does not offer fire as symbol or catastrophe, but as a condition: a volatile negotiation between life and destruction, where the margin for endurance is as thin as the membrane between combustion and collapse. The small flame does not pretend to triumph over its precarity. It simply persists, suspended at the threshold where survival is no longer guaranteed but becomes, itself, an act of quiet resistance.

Ariel Schlesinger’s Bulbul Nest works center on an architecture already marked by inversion. The bulbul bird—its name in Arabic carrying layers of association with the body, confusion, and play—builds its nest with hard, structural elements placed inward and soft, pliable materials exposed on the exterior. Schlesinger was gifted several of these constructions by a bird-watcher, and placed within them cigarette butts: residues of human consumption, decay, and waste.

The intervention is not a gesture of defilement but a material acknowledgment of how systems of care and shelter are infiltrated by systems of contamination. In a world where infrastructures of life and infrastructures of destruction increasingly overlap, Schlesinger’s nests expose not the ruin of nature by culture, but their inseparability. The sacred and the toxic are no longer opposites but cohabitants, woven into the same precarious structures of survival.

Although never a painter, Schlesinger set out to construct a canvas by building a stretcher, applying gesso, and stretching the surface only to dismantle it, fold the material, and immerse it in fire for hours. Combustion inscribed itself into the fabric, not as ornament but as a structural wound. After burning, Schlesinger unfolded the canvas, searching for fragments that could speak to one another--pairing and weaving burnt sections into new configurations.

The final canvases, restretched with their unpainted sides facing outward, bear the scars of combustion not as damage but as pattern, as unstable architecture. In Untitled (Burnt Canvas), fire is not an agent of survival but a force of fragmentation and recomposition, producing surfaces where rupture becomes the basis for new grounds.

Die Installation "Stolpersteine" steht in Bezug zu einem umfassenden Erinnerungsprojekt mit demselben Titel. Die tatsächlichen Stolpersteine sind auf Initiative von Gunter Demnig in vielen Städten Europas verlegt worden, zahlreiche davon auch in Münster. Sie begegnen den Menschen bei Spaziergängen, Einkäufen sowie beim Stadtbummel und erinnern an längst vergessene Vorfahren, die einst hier lebten und an das, was sie während des Zweiten Weltkrieges unter den Nationalsozialisten ertragen mussten.

Ariel Schlesinger greift die Form und Größe der Steine auf und lanciert mit seiner Installation ein künstlerisches Echo auf die Diskussion um die umstrittenen Stolpersteine und die Debatte von Demnigs Projekt.

When Schlesinger first moved to Germany, he was struck by the presence of Stolper-steine—small plaques embedded in the pavement outside homes from which Jewish citizens and others were taken during the Nazi regime. These memorials, marking names, dates, and fates, prompted Schlesinger’s own investigation into the physical structure of memory: what holds a history in place, what anchors loss to the ground. Discovering the original form of the Stolperstein before burial, he created a series of sculptures under the same title. Here, the term “stumbling stone” is taken literally: plaques without names, dates, or locations—anonymous markers that suggest displacement and violence are not confined to the past, nor to a single geography.

Schlesinger’s works resonate with the historical gravity of memory while refusing the closure of fixed monuments. Seriality and material simplicity—hallmarks of minimalist language—are reactivated to amplify historical rupture, creating a field where presence is partial, and remembrance is marked by its own instability.

In Three-Comma Club, Schlesinger brings together the sharpness of blade and flame, two forces that in Hebrew share the same linguistic root—lahav and lehava. The work plays with minimal interventions that produce maximum tension, where absurdity, balance, and risk are held together by the thinnest margin. Survival here is provisional, dependent not on force but on the precise choreography of opposing forces. Schlesinger treats the ordinary as a site of quiet recalibration, where small displacements push everyday materials into a state of improbable equilibrium.

For your consideration

In IKEA you have to follow a long, winding set path through the store: starting with the living rooms, office chairs, dining tables, mattresses, this walk eventually takes you to the sofas, kitchen supplies.. Basically, you are confronted with a giant catalogue in physical form that you can not but follow. It's all precisely planned and constructed, an arranged journey. 

But if you look closely, in every other section in that set path, you can find a hidden and discrete door, not loudly marked or labeled; these doors, we suspect, are for employee use or can be used in case of an emergency. Regular shoppers are meant to stay on the path. These doors forward you in time and throw you into random places along that planned path: you will jump from kitchen towels to office chairs, from bathroom mirrors to storage solutions.

(this is the place to add something poetic about the experience of using these doors)

Inspired by Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid", this series portrays shattered windows inside an abandoned farmhouse in Okazaki, Japan. Each work presents a broken window, framed with its original shards, emphasizing the uneasy proximity between acts of destruction and their representations.

Schlesinger stages not simply the aftermath of damage, but the strange choreography between violence and repair: where breakage is captured, reframed, and made visible as part of the architecture of looking itself. The intervention questions how rupture becomes aestheticized, how disasters are not only witnessed but organized into fragile systems of memory. Schlesinger's method moves beyond documentation; it constructs unstable images where perception itself is fractured alongside the world it observes.

Intangible Ruins constructs a space where memory is not anchored in material remnants but transmitted through bodies, voices, and the fragile practices of knowledge-keep-ing. Schlesinger built a gathering site around a perpetually burning fire, engineered within the exhibition space, where visitors were invited to sit, listen, and tell stories. Here, ruins are not visible structures but ephemeral exchanges: oral histories, lived experiences, and modes of behavior that move across generations without permanent form. The fire, kept alive throughout the exhibition, functions less as symbol than as shelter—a point of convergence for speech, listening, and the slow transfer of knowl-edge. Taxidermy cats inhabit the space as silent presences, remnants of life suspended between death and memory, holding witness to the stories unfolding around them.

In Intangible Ruins, Schlesinger’s work resonates with the speculative atmospheres of Ursula K. Le Guin, where the persistence of life is rooted in fragile architectures of care, storytelling, and collective presence. In Intangible Ruins, history is not archived but carried forward as a series of unstable continuations: living systems sustained by the flickering acts of speaking, listening, and being together in time..

Working with Haaretz, Schlesinger burned and wove together its pages, creating new surfaces from the remnants of historical record.

The burning is not merely symbolic: it echoes both moments of overt violence and the slower, less visible strategies of erasure—displacement, bureaucratic control, cultural fragmentation—that sustain prolonged conflict. Rather than preserving the newspaper as archive, Schlesinger reconfigures it into a material record of dislocation, where the infrastructure of public memory is itself combusted and rewoven. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s insight that violence emerges where structures of meaning fail, these burnt and woven fragments refuse any illusion of intact memory, offering instead unstable and scarred records of contested history.

Over the years, Schlesinger has collected displaced silver crowns of Christ from Ecuador—fragments of devotional objects where the figure and its emblem have been separated. Some crowns have lost their Jesus; some Jesus figures, likely made of more perishable materials, have lost their crowns. Removed from their original contexts, the crowns become ambiguous artifacts: their small scale, rough silversmithing, and dislocation render them strange—suspended between preciousness and defense, recognition and erasure.

Schlesinger assembles them into a suspended garland, a structure oscillating between ornament, boundary, and residue. The crowns carry the imprint of Latin America’s colonial religious history, where Christianity arrived as an instrument of violent transformation, overwriting other cosmologies and modes of life. Their current dislocation—separated from their devotional bodies—registers both loss and persistence, a material memory of conquest and reconfiguration. Echoing the ephemeral garlands made during Sukkot in Schlesinger’s Jewish childhood, the work reframes these remnants not as restored symbols but as unstable architectures of passage, where histories of imposition and survival remain knotted together.