Nuri Koerfer

Nuri Koerfer’s practice interweaves sculpture, design, and analysis of social space. Working with forms that resemble furniture yet refuse strict functionality, she hybridises chairs, shelves, and benches into creatures of ambiguous purpose and character. With their glossy surfaces and bright colours, her works appear at once playful and uncanny – they are objects that invite touch, rest, and reflection, turning the viewer into both performer and spectator.

By cross-fertilising the habitually distinct realms of the animal kingdom and the human domestic sphere, Koerfer stages unlikely encounters that prompt questions about how we inhabit the world. Her sculptures carry an emotional charge that feels both familiar and foreign, exposing a tension between humanity’s drive for rationalisation and order, and the supposedly untamed chaos of the natural world. Drawing loosely on theories of interconnection and kinship, including Donna Haraway’s notion of interspecies entanglement, her work envisions a shared consciousness between beings and objects, rethinking hierarchies ordering the ornamental and the functional, nature and culture.

Koerfer’s evolving vocabulary of hybrid forms proposes sculpture as a potential site for care, attention, and contact. Beneath their amusing and seductive surfaces lies a reflection on how systems of order and hierarchies coexist, and who or what benefits from them.