Nabuqi and Franz Erhard Walther 
The Movable Plinth

The younger artist Nabuqi grew up within the open horizons of post-relational aesthetics. When reflecting on her own practice, she is, to some extent, contemplating paired or grouped relationships. Although her early works did not manifest as open forms—leaving the relationship between the audience and the objects still bound to the modes of gazing and being gazed at, surrounding and being surrounded—she has “constantly tried to resolve and subvert this traditional subject-object relationship.” In her 2018 exhibition Do real things happen in moments of rationality?, she utilized scenographic construction to define the exhibition space as an integral sculpture, thereby achieving a reversal of roles between the work and the spectator: as the floor of the entire space expanded into a plinth, she “had already incorporated the concept of the crowd into the sculpture.”

Many of Nabuqi's specific works can similarly be interpreted through this dyad of “relation/plinth,” where the plinth acts as a lever that tilts and modulates the audience's angle and degree of entry into the artwork. By transforming open-air theaters and fountains into indoor scenes, she transports publicness into privacy through the shift of the plinth. Her transformation of floor lamps into non-illuminating bronze sculptures effectively endows everyday objects with an invisible sculptural plinth. The Drifting seat (2021) appearing in the exhibition hall leave the choice entirely to the audience: you may endow them with such an invisible plinth, or simply use them as standard seating. Her work Fish finding a path ashore (2024) can be viewed both as a historical metaphor for the fate of an ethnic group and as an endeavor by sculpture to seek a new plinth within contemporary contexts.