ALMOST IN BETWEEN – Melanie Ender

The exhibition _almost in between_ at Kunsthaus Dahlem marks Austrian artist **Melanie Ender**'s first solo presentation in Germany. For this occasion, Ender has conceived a series of delicate, site-specific installations in dialogue with the building's architecture and its history as a place of artistic production. The works continue her process-oriented practice rooted in working routines, spatial perception and an intensive engagement with material as an active counterpart. Presented in the former state atelier of Arno Breker, one of the principal monumental sculptors of National Socialism, the pieces by Melanie Ender resist any claim to permanence. The artist examines how structures designed for stability and control reveal, over time, their openness to transformation. Straight lines become distorted, seemingly stiff metal rods balance in fragile situations – Ender's works remain sensitive and responsive to their surroundings. In this way, they dissolve rigid orders and allow processes of change to become tangible. Ender's engagement with the history of the space extends also to the materials themselves. As in her broader practice, the artist collects and documents traces and remnants in the form of rust dust and iron oxide residue produced while working with metal, subsequently transferring them onto textile as pigment. In doing so, she allows those "archival" materials to continue generating meaning in the present. Alongside an interest in processes of transformation, Melanie Ender's works introduce another important dimension: a sense of corporeality that emerges through the visible traces left by encounters with materials. It is conveyed through material conditions associated with bodily existence: the compressed surfaces of the textiles are marked by tensions and cracks; structures reveal their dependence on support; the works as a whole retain traces of friction, scratching, pressure and other forms of contact. Corporeality also shapes the way the works relate to space. Rather than echoing or competing with the scale of the architecture, their proportions remain connected to human presence, allowing for a direct physical relation between the works and the viewer. In contrast to the monumentality of the architecture, they foreground the sense of vulnerability and fragility.