Reading Rämistrasse #180: Kristina Grigorjeva on Niloufar Emamifar at Kunsthalle Zürich

[Kunsthalle Zürich disclaimer: Kristina Grigorjeva writes here about a show at Kunsthalle Zürich]


Spaces are relational. We enter them with purpose and remain with intention; we leave them marked, and they mark us in return. At Kunsthalle Zürich, Niloufar Emamifar performs a gesture so restrained that for visitors unfamiliar with the gallery space, it can initially pass unnoticed. No spectacle announces the shift. No wall text insists upon it. Those who know the room experience something else: a slight dislocation. The first step onto the matte, tarmac-like surface carries a subtle resistance. Footsteps feel slower, heavier, strangely deliberate.

Raising the entire floor by twelve centimetres – a measure the artist coined as roughly the height gained when standing on tiptoes – introduces the human body directly into architectural discourse. It is a minimal shift that recalibrates perception. The room loses its stable metric. Scale slips. And uncertainty, here, becomes productive.




A rubber stage surface covers the gallery, using a material manufactured by Gerriets and a taping technique typical of ballet and theatre stages. Two corners are slightly raised, forming pronounced inclines (one at roughly 34 degrees, another at 18), as if the room itself were quietly flexing, finding its balance. One rises, the other descends. Up and down. Expansion and collapse. The result is neither sculpture nor architecture exactly, but something that hovers between the two: a system that recalibrates the body’s relationship to space.

Emamifar’s gesture is the extension of her pursuit of institutional critique, yet it avoids the declarative tone that often accompanies that tradition. Rather than confronting the institution head-on, she introduces a small disturbance within its structural assumptions. Stability – what architecture promises as constant – reveals itself to be engineered, provisional, negotiable. Her installations often resemble architectures that have absorbed too many histories: structures still standing but slightly displaced from their original coordinates, where the systems seem designed for stability, and now continuously try to find their balance instead.




From this raised surface, the exhibition unfolds through a series of discrete yet interconnected gestures, prompting the quiet proposition – what if the ground itself were a series of questions? The floor itself becomes the stage, and every element in the exhibition appears as a performer acting on this newly calibrated ground. A fragile architectural structure is held together by rubber bands, suggesting a house perpetually on the verge of collapse. A narrow cast of a corner of an existing local building, excluded from zoning regulations, stands upright in the gallery, translating legal abstraction into sculptural form. A video on a low monitor, recording the interior of Tehran’s Ferdowsi Movie Theatre during regular screening hours, where the expected film has been replaced by a slow pan across the building’s abandoned upper floor. Each work occupies the floor like a performer taking position – measured, restrained, deliberate. Together they operate less as discrete artworks than as components within a larger system, one that seems subtly out of alignment.




Speaking with the artist on the morning of February 28, as numerous conflicts continued to reshape our geopolitical landscape, it’s difficult not to read the work through another register of instability. Emamifar does not suggest geopolitical commentary directly. Yet the exhibition resonates with a broader condition: the sense of living within infrastructures whose promises – political, architectural, historical –remain perpetually deferred.

Ultimately, Offcut offers less an answer than a proposition: a space in which stability has been gently unsettled. Emamifar invites us to reconsider how we inhabit spaces we assume we already understand. Architecture becomes provisional. Movement becomes conscious. The ground becomes negotiable.

Niloufar Emamifar, Offcut, Kunsthalle Zürich, 7 February–25 May 2026