Barengasse Museum, Zurich, Switzerland 

8 August  to  6 December , 2013

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A is for Albatross invites you to see the wind. Haseeb Ahmed, who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology programme, treats the artwork as a tool for making the invisible visible. What matters here is not an object on a plinth, but the fleeting forms that arise when art meets its surroundings.

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Working with engineers at the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, a NATO research centre outside Brussels, Ahmed brings the discipline of the laboratory into the gallery. Instruments hum, models respond, and surfaces record the touch of moving air. Each element carries the story of its making, yet the parts gather into a single installation that lets pressure, flow and turbulence draw themselves in space. You do not only look at the work; you feel it working on the room.

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The title comes from a stark experiment. In the Institute’s Plasmatron, a chamber that simulates the heat of spacecraft re-entry, Ahmed placed a letter A made from the same ablative cork used to shield vehicles as they cross back into the atmosphere. He asked a simple question. If all channels of transmission failed, could language return to earth as matter. The answer was yes. The letter emerged scorched but legible, a sign rewritten by air and fire.

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This exhibition sets out a clear position. Art can ask precise questions, can stand alongside scientific rigour, and can widen what we are able to perceive together. Here the gallery becomes an observatory. What is usually unseen takes shape, and looking becomes a kind of knowledge. The legacy of A is for Albatross is more than the objects it contains. It leaves methods for paying attention, a renewed respect for the medium we breathe, and a sense that art can help us read the world in motion.