Nora Schultz’s “Now,”

Thin fiberglass tubes and shiny steel wires, the primary materials in Nora Schultz’s exhibition, draw fine white and silver lines through three consecutive spaces. In the first, the tubes form a flat structure of two circles connected by four lines, with torn-up pieces of white paper between them. My first association is with a broken kite, but as a printed image on the adjacent wall suggests, it also resembles a compressed snare drum.

In the second room is another drum that more closely recalls the instrument’s usual cylindrical shape, the thin tubes lightly attached to the vaulted ceiling making a subtly commanding volume out of nearly nothing. Dangling from this vast limp scaffold is a tattered white paper flag. Though visually slight, the intervention crackles on the surface of the viewer’s senses, seeming to fill the whole room by its void. Seen in another way, the drum is also the face of a clock, draped across the architecture. This is how Schultz tests her material both physically and semantically, stretching it this way and that, allowing its real and connotative features to cross-pollinate. Time, in Schultz’s exhibition, is not expansive; the “now” of its title does not refer to “the contemporary” but to this moment. “Now,” puts the physical untenability of the sculpture in temporal terms: its structure—both how it signifies and what its objectivity is—cannot be guaranteed beyond the moment in which it is viewed.

Since the late aughts, Schultz has used ordinary building materials to probe the relationship of plastic forms to bodies, movement, space, and time. “Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show,” a 2009 exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, showed Schultz’s work alongside that of artists including Ei Arakawa, Nick Mauss, and Nikolas Gambaroff: artists whose self-conscious use of their respective media opens up questions around process, institutional context, and performativity. In “Portikus Printing Plant and Portikus Sounds,” at the titular art center in 2012, she presented a live performance of a printing workshop, implying that the press itself be understood as a sculptural interlocutor between people and the images they produced. Whereas Gambaroff’s new works, concurrently on show at Schiefe Zähne in Berlin, suggest an artist straightforwardly devoted to the medium of painting—not deconstructing so much as simply practicing the medium—it would seem that Schultz has stuck to her guns.

In “Now,” as ever, audiences familiar with her work might read it as a kind of sculpture “beside itself,” imagining the cumbersome dance with unruly lengths of fiberglass that would have been required during the show’s installation, or seeing the ad hoc attachment points (tape, string, a spring clamp) as indications of a performative hypothesis of sculpture rather than sculpture itself. But the post-conceptual moment during which Schultz’s work first emerged feels like a very long time ago now. Whatever else one might think of contemporary art’s more recent traditionalist turn, a new paradigm seems to allow process to recede into the background here, too, in favor of a subtle yet piercing aesthetic experience of material presence.

Understood on these terms, performativity, playfulness, and improvisation are not so much the contents of Schultz’s work as its tools. The installation’s makeshift quality now reads as a sculptural statement on the fine sensual and cognitive attunements that form the basis of perception and, by extension, the provisional status of any kind of presence. In “Now,” Schultz manifests the minimum sign required to make an index; the minimum line to draw a picture; the minimum structure to produce volume; the indication of sound long before you hear it.

A thin, metallic drumming resounds in the last room in the exhibition, emanating from a video, installed at foot height inside a small room, in which a tin drum stick plays on an uneven tin surface. Finally, the only audible drum in the show is a representation, lacking physical volume or resonance space: these constituent parts having been deconstructed, both semantically and materially, and distributed across the rooms. Recognition and opacity go hand in hand here: I “get” it while at the same time being left with the question of what “it” is.