Permanently emitting an SOS signal in Morse code, Olafur Eliasson’s Your lost lighthouse (2020) reverses the function of the lighthouse by becoming the object in distress. Rather than the guiding light to any number of ships in stormy seas, the rainbow-tinged flashes indicate unknown troubles from within. A prism-like casing looks more organic than mechanical, allowing the light to refract from its New Zealand sourced antique lens across the space.

A remake of a renaissance sculpture from the St Louis Art Museum, Oliver Laric’s Reclining Pan (2019) depicts the half-goat half-man god of the woods, known for his mischievousness and carnality. The fragmented vision, comprised of several 3D printed components in different materials, asks questions about the nature of facsimiles and copies, engaging with ideas of authorship and appropriation for a post-internet generation. This generation will also find answers to the growing limitations in proliferating their artworks globally. According to the artist, objects may become interchangeable as long as their concepts are floating worldwide.

The nesting pigeons of Anri Sala’s Voladores (Flyers) (2020) are shown in their adopted home of the zoo in the artist’s native Tirana, where the birds settled after the site was abandoned. The pigeons have purposefully moved into a new form of captivity, their loss of mobility perhaps reflective of our current predicament. Within the current context the notion of a self-governing migration of species gets a very poignant twist, considering the origin of the virus.

Mathew Hale’s One Silver Dollar Paintings series, begun in 2016, is part of a process the artist undertakes in which he photographs both sides of Marilyn Monroe’s place of burial in Westwood, Los Angeles – both the mausoleum building, with her plaque of remembrance, and the nondescript white wall of the car park behind. In the image Hale also includes a small painting on a price tag as a means of identification.

During our period of isolation, the computer has been an important means of communicating with colleagues, friends and family. Cast in silicon by Henrik Olesen, these three keyboards, titled Auflösung I, II & III (Dissolution I, II & II) (2020), convey a tactility that evokes the fragility of the human body, further emphasized by the frayed edges that seem to be in a state of decay.

Furthermore, for some ‘lockdown’ has meant more time with family, which might impinge upon our work, Thea Djordjadze has suggested the opposite with an untitled painting on plaster (2020) created in collaboration with her young daughter. Recalling the exuberance of early twentieth-century modernist experiments in painting, there is a childish, unhinged element to the daubs of color.

Another World is Possible (2020), reproduced from a real protest sign by Sam Durant, becomes especially pertinent amidst the pandemic and protests across the world, questioning and eroding the status quo. Both the text and font are copied precisely from their original source, replicated as a light box not dissimilar to those used for advertising. However, the slogan still evokes our longing for a change and hope for a better future.

Spread across three locations in the exhibition, Manfred Pernice’s Strandgut III (Flotsam III) (1999–2020) makes use of seemingly discarded pieces of material—old cupboard doors and pieces of board, scraps of metal, a still-functioning lightbulb—to interrogate and repurpose the individual histories of each fragment. More meticulously crafted barrel-like structures resemble furniture or containers for something unspecified, alluding further to an unpredictable future. Pernice’s proposition to the current situation is to re-evaluate the existing inventory as sufficient and settle with the existing in changing constellations: the sculpture has been shown twice before, but in fundamentally different configurations.