Trust Exercises: On “Trust Issues” at Kornfeld Galerie, Berlin

Installation view, 2025, “Trust Issues” at Kornfeld Galerie, Berlin Germany Photo Andrea Katheder
 

By Rafael Sergi and Hans Krestel April 3, 2025

In a world increasingly governed by opaque algorithms, AI-generated language, and the ever-present fog of misinformation, trust has become both currency and crisis. “Trust Issues,” curated by Tbilisi-born and New York-based curator, writer and researcher Nina Chkareuli Mdivani, on view at Kornfeld Galerie in Berlin, brings together three artists—Saelia Aparicio, Gonzalo Garcia, and Rusudan Khizanishvili—who confront this crisis not by offering answers, but by using visual ambiguity, affective tension, and symbolic density to explore the many ways trust is constructed, tested, and broken. Through sculpture, drawing, and painting, they pose the uncomfortable yet timely question: What does it mean to trust—in systems, in others, in ourselves—when everything feels precarious?

The exhibition does not take a didactic stance. Instead, it opens space for reflection, discomfort, and, perhaps, reckoning. The works on view feel less like statements and more like open-ended prompts—visual meditations that touch upon politics, identity, mythology, and embodiment. At a time when institutional trust is eroding and digital media disorients our sense of reality, Trust Issues suggests that art, in its opacity and resistance to simplification, might be the perfect medium to stage these questions.

Based in London, Saelia Aparicio works at the porous edges between drawing and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, humor and criticality. Her anthropomorphic stools—genderfluid, hybrid, and playfully grotesque—seem to wriggle out of the narrow binaries that structure much of contemporary life. With their bulbous, elongated limbs and soft, lumpy textures, they refuse to be categorized. Are they chairs? Creatures? A kind of furniture for a posthuman world? These are objects that both invite and resist use.

Aparicio’s materials—wood, clay, fabric, glass—have a fleshy presence. Their handcrafted quality, their visible seams and textures, foreground a kind of embodied vulnerability. This is sculpture not as monument but as body—open, precarious, in flux. Her accompanying drawings extend these ideas, mapping a surreal, at times erotic, topography of mutant forms and folkloric motifs. While rooted in a feminist politics of the body, Aparicio’s practice reaches further, into the speculative and the absurd.

There is, however, a hopeful, even utopian, note in Aparicio’s work. Unlike the other artists in the exhibition, her exploration of trust leans toward possibility rather than betrayal. She interrogates the ways bodies (both human and non-human) can be sites of resistance and imagination, rather than control and constraint. A subtle but poignant gesture in the exhibition is the hidden “temple” embedded within one of her sculptures—a private space of contemplation, hope, and new forms of being.

Gonzalo Garcia, Sick muse, 2023,oil on canvas, 80 x 120cm

If Aparicio whispers in metaphor, Gonzalo Garcia confronts us with visual brutality. His oil paintings—figurative, confrontational, and richly cinematic—foreground the tangled relationship between violence, power, and trust. Garcia, who is based in Mexico, draws from the visual and narrative aesthetics of 1970s Mexican cinema, including films like El Castillo de la Pureza (The Castle of Purity) and Los Cachorros (The Cubs), to create emotionally charged tableaux that oscillate between the theatrical and the allegorical.

Castration, physical domination, and ambiguous scenes of punishment unfold across his canvases, rendered in a painterly style that is at once raw and lyrical. Crucially, we never see faces—neither those of the aggressors nor the victims. This absence strips the works of easy moralizing and forces the viewer into an uneasy complicity. Who are these figures? Could they be us?

Garcia’s work is not simply a meditation on violence, but on the conditions that make violence invisible, normalized, or perversely acceptable. His refusal to depict identity is strategic—it compels the viewer to fill in the gaps, to confront their own projections and biases. At the same time, his references to the 1963 student massacres in Mexico situate his work within a historical-political framework that highlights state violence and repression. His paintings capture the tension between public and private spaces, between external control and internal resistance, between political oppression and personal queer identity.

The paintings of Rusudan Khizanishvili, a Tbilisi-based artist, operate in a space between myth and protest, past and present. Created in the context of the 2024 political protests in Georgia, her latest series uses symbolic language—red theatrical curtains, veiled figures, ornamental patterns—to interrogate the mechanisms of control that operate beneath the surface of societal life. Khizanishvili’s figures are timeless: neither ancient nor modern, neither male nor female. They are abstracted, symbolic, and—despite their anonymity—charged with emotion.

Her palette is bold: reds, blacks, golds, and deep blues dominate the canvas, suggesting both danger and divinity. The curtain motif recurs again and again, evoking not only the literal theater, but also the political stage—what is shown, what is concealed, and who decides what we see. At times, these figures recall Persian miniatures or medieval icons; at others, they evoke the techno-mysticism of science fiction. And yet, despite their art-historical references, they speak directly to the present.

Installation view, 2025, “Trust Issues” at Kornfeld Galerie, Berlin Germany Photo Andrea Katheder
 

Khizanishvili’s works are allegories, yes—but not distant or abstract ones. They feel intensely personal, as if the artist is wrestling not only with the condition of her country, but with the very question of agency: how do we live, create, and maintain inner harmony in a society that continually tries to script us? Her work is deeply tied to the instability of the Georgian political landscape, particularly in relation to Russia. While not overtly political, her paintings are haunted by the impossibility of trust in a context where sovereignty itself is precarious.

The artists explore trust not as a stable foundation, but as a shifting terrain—affected by politics, shaped by identity, and fractured by technology. Aparicio, Garcia, and Khizanishvili each work in highly distinct formal languages, but they share a deep suspicion of appearances, a resistance to certainty, and a commitment to art’s potential to crack open the world, if only slightly.

In the end, the exhibition does not restore trust—how could it? Instead, it teaches us how to live without it. Or better yet: how to trust selectively, critically, and with care. In a time when so much around us is designed to manipulate belief, Trust Issues asks us to slow down, to sit with discomfort, to notice what is omitted as much as what is shown.

In that sense, it aligns closely with the writings of Mark Fisher, whose specter lingers throughout. As he once wrote, “A secret sadness lurks behind the twenty-first-century’s forced smile.” This exhibition does not smile. But it does listen, look, and imagine. And maybe that’s a beginning. WM