Between curbside and landfill: this volume explores the intersection of sculpture, photography, and installation through discarded and repurposed materials.

In By the Highway, multimedia artist Ser Serpas walks through Paris with photographer Rafik Greiss, searching for the discarded materials that shape her sculptures and installations. Whether she is working with trash or hoarded things, Serpas manipulates these materials in ways that complicate conventional value systems and inscribe meaning into what would otherwise be waste. She often brings her sculptures back to the street after the exhibition, letting them become “trash” while playing with the boundary of what is allowed inside and outside the museum. In his work, Greiss captures matter in a state oscillating between representational image and factual substance. His photographs are less about specific objects and more about examining these objects in their own lives and how they react with each other. This volume in the KONTEXT series presents new approaches to form, volume, and materiality in Serpas and Greiss’s work. An essay by artist and author Dora Budor situates Serpas’s method within the traditions of readymades and assemblage, examining her work in relation to the processes of accumulation, obsolescence, and scavenging.