The Threshold of Impermanence
May 3–October 25, 2026
In her artistic practice, Caline Aoun navigates between local conditions and global infrastructures. The artist works with installations and often in site-specific contexts, using media such as sculpture, printmaking, works on paper, and video. Her internationally established practice makes invisible processes perceptible and addresses key contemporary issues—ecological fragility, technological permeation, and our relationship with time and resources.
Her comprehensive solo exhibition The Threshold of Impermanence spans the Kunstmuseum and the Kunsthalle Appenzell and explores the conditions under which natural and artificial systems emerge, function, and change. Impermanence is not presented as loss or dissolution, but as a process of becoming, in which time, energy, and the environment are at play. Caline Aoun uses technical devices and everyday materials—such as printing systems, water circuits, or natural substances—to render phenomena such as light, heat, humidity, or data into aesthetic and physical experiences. The exhibition responds to the architectural and atmospheric conditions of the respective venues and explores how the configurations of devices influence states and shape perception.
At the Kunstmuseum, the focus is on the elemental and the natural—on water, light, heat, and time as forces that precede images and meanings. With the silver monochromes Dreaming of Electric Dew, 2026, which evoke the Kunstmuseum’s stainless-steel façade, Aoun artificially recreates a natural phenomenon. Cooling units keep their surfaces below the freezing point, causing the humidity in the air to condense on them. In Emanating Ground, 2026, fluorescent tubes are removed from the Kunstmuseum’s ceiling, encased in copper, and placed on the floor—light becomes physically perceptible as heat.
At the Kunsthalle, the focus shifts to the cultural: to language, image production, and technological systems through which perception, circulation, and meaning arise. In Infinite Energy, Finite Time, 2019, printer inks in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—the primary colours of the CMYK printing system—flow through four interconnected fountains. Through tubes, valves, and a time-controlled mechanism, the colours slowly blend into a uniform mass over the duration of the exhibition.
At both exhibition venues, The Threshold of Impermanence emphasises impermanence as the moment in which systems reveal the conditions that sustain them and, at the same time, dissolve them. What remains are not objects, but a trace: of circulation, of exposure, of time.
Bio
Caline Aoun (b. 1983, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London between 2002 and 2005. She then studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 2006 to 2009. In 2012, she completed her studies with a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London. Her training has been shaped by an early engagement with printmaking techniques, digital imaging systems and process-oriented working methods.
Her early solo exhibitions include Scape, Sartorial Project Space, London (2009), and The Future of Smart Technology in Your Hands, Noshowspace, London (2013). Following her return to Beirut, she presented Concrete Layers at Grey Noise, Dubai (2015), and realised Remote/Local as part of Art Basel Statements, Basel (2015). With Fields of Space, Marfa’, Beirut (2016), she established a more spatially expansive, installation-based practice. Caline Aoun gained international attention in 2018 when she was named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. In this context, she presented the institutional solo exhibition Seeing Is Believing at MAXXI—Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2018), and later at PalaisPopulaire, Berlin (2020). In 2019, she took part in the Sharjah Biennial 14 with the project Time Travel at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2019). Other major projects include How Will It End?, Villa Empain in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2021), and Matters of Duration as part of Paris+ by Art Basel, Paris (2022). In 2023, she presented the solo exhibition Are Androids Covered with Electric Dew? at Marfa’, Beirut (2023). In 2024, Caline Aoun realised the large-scale site-specific project The Desert Has No Surface as part of Desert X AlUla, AlUla, Saudi Arabia (2024), as well as the solo exhibition When the Invisible Touches the Surface at The Dock, Leitrim, Ireland (2024). In 2025, this was followed by La Bibliothèque Sensible de Caline Aoun, a permanent installation at the Bibliothèque Orientale of the Université Saint-Joseph, Beirut (2025).
Curator: Stefanie Gschwend, Director Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell. Press contact: Luca Tarelli, ltarelli@kunstmuseumappenzell.ch.
