Iris Touliatou’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein München, titled Shifts, marks her most extensive presentation in Germany to date, comprising newly produced works that engage directly with the institution’s infrastructures and procedures. Refusing to treat the Kunstverein as a neutral backdrop, Touliatou conceives a series of scores functioning as protocols. These works bring to light the mechanisms that traverse the space, its staff, and operations, while attending to the conditions of labor, language, and emotional involvement.

The exhibition follows a trajectory already set in motion with SCORE FOR TONE CHANGE (2023/24), a software-based work that intervened in the daily operations of the Kunstverein by modulating its English-language communications. Mediated through the staff, it sought to recalibrate the institution’s syntactic functions and redistribute its capacity for reception and perception. Such interventions, both material and immaterial, lie at the core of Touliatou’s practice and resonate with the Kunstverein’s own commitment to reexamining its functions and histories.

In this presentation, sculptural gestures reach the edges of the space and its regulatory codes, exposing the often invisible structures that organize institutional life. The exhibition sets into motion politics of support, negotiation, and visibility, proposing the sideways glance as method. It also unfolds at a moment of administrative and curatorial transition, underscoring that the Kunstverein is shaped not only by what it exhibits but also by the conditions that render these exhibitions possible, through time, resources, and attention. Within this shifting terrain, the institution emerges as an active agent in the shaping of subjectivities, communities, and possible future scenarios.