TOUCH, SPRING / BERÜHRUNG, FRÜHLING

SOLO EXHIBITION BY AUBREY THEOBALD

​

January 9 - January 27, 2026

Opening: Friday, January 9 at 06:00 PM

​​​

Spring appears to us percolating in waiting as an accumulation of subtle variations - shifts in green light, delicate flirtations, a moment of warmth on your cheek - unfolding in partial fragments, delayed and constructed. (1)

​

It seems that a similar uninhibited, raw beauty delicately captures the large-scale, accumulative sculptural installation created by Aubrey Theobald in North Berlin. However, in the case of her exhibition TOUCH, SPRING / BERÜHRUNG, FRÜHLING at Scope BLN, the felicitation of light carries a shade of pale yellow, a scent of chamomile, and the melancholic ruminations of the cello.The viewer is seduced by Theobald to enter with irrepressible curiosity into obsessive meditations on longing for warmth, presented in the midst of the harsh Berlin winter in January.

​

The exhibition space is filled with objects discarded locally, personal material debris, sculptures, planes marking imaginary spaces, photographs, dried flowers, remains of past relationships, small details and semi-visible prints, sounds, and scents. Despite this abundance of objects with seemingly unclear origins and purposes, we do not feel as if we have entered some kind of Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities). The feeling is one of wholeness, homogeneity, gentle power, and some inexplicable childish melancholy.

​

The exhibition displays emotional responses to found objects (zum verschenken) that are grounded and recontextualized signs of soft bureaucracy in city regulation, formed through intimate collaborations with friends and lovers. These are highly contrasted with romantic gestures - evidence of collection as a hopeful act, both preserving and encasing; surface coating and trapping delicate media in high-end industrial and poetic coatings (car lacquer, resin, wax) to give them as much resilience as the paralleled structures. Everything leads us to delicate interventions of personal ritual, not dissimilar to the functions of soft bureaucracy allowing us a bouquet of weeds. (2)

​

The project engages with contemporary concerns such as placemaking, hostile architecture, and affect theory, while simultaneously contrasting these frameworks with a deep sensitivity to so-called “ugly emotions” and obsessive ritual. Looped sound and repetitive material action function as supporting elements within the sculptural installations that further mark themes of patience, coping, discomfort, and release.

​

Having grown up as a cellist, the artist has often performed their own musical scores as part of the work—making this project the first instance in which this is not the case. The sound component is a collaboration with Martin Edigi and Wojtek Prażuch, both of whom were invited to respond to Theobald’s emotive score on spring. Their responses, unbeknownst to one another, later melded as an intrapersonal conversation.

​

Under the collective Support Systems, Theobald and Jesse Ly negotiate how to lean on and support whom we love from a distance while grief, loss, and loneliness outweigh physical proximity; through the bureaucratic unit of a Baumschutzkorb, the rose (both found, captured, and collected on significant days), and the memory of us holding one another.

 

Aubrey Theobald says about TOUCH, SPRING / BERÜHRUNG, FRÜHLING:

​

“Winter reaching for everything that spring offers - linking to small ephemeral materials that could mean something if they were extracted. The work has the effect of an overgrown street corner that longs for warmth. A co-poesis; industrial, ubiquitous materials paired with ephemeral, deteriorating, molding, and broken-off fragments containing hyper-sentimentality and beauty.

Small moments of meditation and focus, coping with objects later discarded—linking them to fragments of the body or memory from upheaval to delicate plucking; longing, waiting, warmth, repetition, softened, rusted…”

__________________________________________

​

(1) Zadie Smith describes the “splashy spring” in North London as having a “shade of green for every possible felicitation of light,” emphasizing its unplanned, raw beauty.

​

 

(2)  Handstraußregelung legislates the threshold between public and private aesthetics, a rule (a very small, controlled gesture) that allows us to take home one bouquet of weeds everyday, gauged by the size of “a palm.”

​​