Ariel Schlesinger

Ariel Schlesinger (Hebrew: אריאל שליסינגר; born 1980, Jerusalem) lives and works in Berlin, New York and Quito known for sculptures, installations, and engineered systems that explore precarious material states and the interplay between human and nonhuman forces.

Schlesinger’s work unfolds as a negotiation between material fact and improbable survival. Across sculptures, films, and engineered systems, he collaborates with materials—gas, fire, air, water—not as inert matter, but as agents whose own behaviors structure form, time, and risk. Objects in Schlesinger’s world are neither dead things nor metaphors; they are companions in a precarious architecture where life, collapse, endurance, and memory are inseparable. His practice stages not monumental gestures, but subtle deflections: improbable continuities that emerge where combustion flickers, pressure destabilizes, or infrastructure quietly gives way.

Rather than engineering stability, Schlesinger constructs provisional systems where matter acts with its own logic—fraying, sustaining, failing—without narrative closure. This material intelligence carries the ethical weight of an Arendtian world: one where human and nonhuman forces shape each other, where history materializes not as record but as rupture, displacement, and fragile construction. Violence in Schlesinger’s work does not erupt as spectacle; it circulates atmospherically, engineered into ordinary objects, slow infrastructures, and unseen thresholds, echoing the conditions that TJ Demos has mapped across ecological and political terrains.