State of Affairs by Alungoo Xatan & everything it made us say - Mae at UdK Rundgang 2026
There is a building in the room, and it is dissolving.
Alungoo Xatan didn't set out to build the Reichstag. She set out to feel something specific: stuck, frozen, frustrated. Then she went looking for a shape that could hold it. The shape she found belongs to the state. The material she chose belongs to everyone.
375 kilograms of salt, modeled by hand over nine months, no gloves. By the end, her skin was cracking from the moisture the salt kept pulling out of it. A classmate with a skin condition told her she could never touch this material. Xatan kept going anyway. "Aggression is definitely part of the conceptual coming together of this piece," she says. And then, almost as an aside, that looking at the finished work, what she mostly feels has less to do with the sculpture than with the fact that she's graduating. Relief, not resolution.
This is State of Affairs: a national monument built from something you could, technically, eat. Something that dissolves. Something her professor actually licked, two weeks before the opening, just to check.
It would be easy to call this a comment on Germany, on power, on what nations choose to preserve in stone versus what they let rot. Xatan would probably let you have that reading. But the more precise thing she built is a trap for a feeling: the specific tension of wanting to get closer to something and being kept, physically and otherwise, at a distance. She designed the plinth to keep people from touching it. And then she watched them want to anyway.
That tension didn't stay in the room with the sculpture. It came with us, twenty-four of us, into the circle next door: Mae's symposium. And it came out in twenty-four different directions.
We sat in a circle, close enough to look each other in the eye, to listen, to answer one another. This is the symposium: each of us holding a question shaped by Alungoo's work, waiting to be asked out loud. There was no right answer and no wrong one, only what you felt.
The circle opened with Mareike Wulf. Her question asked what could still feel stable, even while it kept changing. She reached for Heraclitus without being asked to: change is the only constant, you never can step twice in the same river. It's the kind of line that could sound like a deflection, quoting a dead philosopher instead of answering for herself, except it wasn't. It was the truest possible answer to a question about what we pretend is stable. Nothing is. She wasn't going to perform otherwise.
Then the room started circling something Xatan had built into the sculpture without naming it outright: discomfort, and its role in human experience as an engine of discovery, of artworks, of people, of things, of ourselves.
Bastian Flaig pushed back on the premise a little: he hadn't actually felt discomfort standing in front of the piece, not until he knew the material was salt, knew about the cuts on Xatan's hands. The whiteness alone read as snow, not injury. Information, not sensation.
Amir Mahdian took the question further out: discomfort is the loudest signal we have, he said, precisely because it's built to move us. And noticing it in other people, not just flinching from your own, is close to the whole definition of compassion. "It doesn't necessarily have to be very visible," he said. Most of the time, it isn't.
Nobody had planned for these answers to talk to each other. They just did.
Vanessa Emanuela Guarino's question moved the circle onto a new layer of discomfort: attraction and resistance, held together in the same thing. Discomfort works like that, she said: it keeps you at a distance, and it makes you curious enough to close it. Hate works the same way. She was in the middle of reading Lezioni sull'odio, Michela Murgia's book on hatred, and the question landed right on top of it. It's a feeling we've decided to be ashamed of, she said, even though it might be one of the most necessary ones we have. Say it out loud and people file you under dangerous. Swallow it instead, and it doesn't disappear, it curdles into something worse, sometimes violence itself. If people could say I hate you plainly, the whole trajectory might bend somewhere else. Her own attraction and resistance were right there: drawn to a feeling everyone's agreed not to touch.
Sissy Marino's question circled the same pull, closer to the ground. She'd caught herself doing it physically, in front of the sculpture: stepping in, stepping back, in and out, without noticing the pattern until the question named it. Not understanding something, she said, is exactly what triggers that motion. Curiosity pulls you toward it. The discomfort of not getting it pushes you away. And the push and the pull aren't opposites fighting each other, they're the same engine, the thing that eventually drags you toward an answer.
Carl-Christian Gehl picked up her sentence almost mid-air. "I think I can extend on what you just said, Sissy." The pull-in, he said, is the moment you think you're getting somewhere with a piece of work. The pause is the moment you suspect you're not. And both happen whether you're looking at the artwork or making it, he'd watched Xatan describe fighting the material for nine months and heard the same rhythm.
Lea Kramhöller took the same idea and brought it back to the object itself. Good art, she said, creates just enough resistance to be attractive. Not shock, not the jolt an attention economy usually rewards to grab people. Just enough tension to be worth staying with. That, for her, was exactly what Xatan had built: political weight, social weight, material weight, held subtly enough that it pulls you in rather than pushing you off.
Carlo Giulini named what happens the moment discomfort stops being hidden: people get more honestly themselves, for better or worse. Some go quiet. Some go loud. He didn't moralize about which is right, only that the mask tends to slip either way.
Simay Salman had already found the evidence for it on the floor: footprints in the salt dust, left by people who kept getting drawn closer despite the barrier meant to keep them back. Visible discomfort, she said, doesn't only push people away. Sometimes it's exactly what makes them lean in.
Ipek Akbaş took the whole thread and widened it past the room. Instability, she said, might be more real than stability, especially now. Xatan's sculpture is already breaking down, and that isn't a flaw in the material, it's the material telling the truth. Life doesn't hold still either. Pretending otherwise is the actual illusion.
Igor Tannus's question turned the same instability toward something warmer: what still makes a place feel like home, even while it keeps changing? For him it comes down to two things, feeling and ritual. He remembers arriving in Berlin seven years ago and noticing, two weeks in, that the constant hum of where am I going next had simply gone quiet. That was home arriving, no ceremony required. On the days it doesn't arrive on its own, he has a ritual for calling it back: crispy chicken, an episode of Glee, a blanket. Rituals matter most, he said, for people who've had to leave one place to find another.
And then it came back to Xatan.
She got her own question, like everyone else: discomfort, and what it lets us notice. Her answer folded the whole afternoon back into her own practice: discomfort brings out the most basic version of a person, she said, and for her, that version happens to be creative. Making the work is how she processes the negative feeling, rather than around it. Then, almost thrown away: "there's a friend that says maybe you should do therapy, you know? And you're like, nah, I'm a sculptor."
It landed as a joke. It wasn't only a joke.
Before the last question closed the circle, she said something quieter, to someone standing near her: that Mae seems to bring people together, and that this, a room full of us finishing each other's sentences about a sculpture made of salt, might be the whole reason artists make anything at all. Not the object. The conversation the object makes possible.
We walked out having built, out loud and without planning to, the same idea Xatan spent nine months building alone: something solid enough to stand in a room, and honest enough to admit it won't last.
Mae at UdK Rundgang - Private Tour & Symposium with Alungoo Xatan and Nils Blau. 18 July 2026, UdK Berlin.
